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PHILADELPHIANS 
ABROAD 



PHILADELPHIANS 
ABROAD 



Copyrighted 1908 
WM. J. CONLEN 



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IAKY 0tCtfNnWi.S5? 
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Auti 26 )yoa 

U.'JuSS'LX-- AXc. No. 
I JOPY B. 



FOREWORD. 



Lest this printed record of a summer vacation 
of four friends should fall in the way of the 
casual reader, turned critic, and thereby suffer 
a judgment, only merited by more pretentious 
writings, we consider it advisable to state that 
to any requirements of such reader we plead 
Nient Comprise. 

Brown is responsible for the printed form 
and all four travelers for its existence. It has 
been impossible to really portray the pleasure 
and profit of a most delightful trip. The charm 
is in the atmosphere of memory which it is 
hoped some of the following chapters will evoke 
— we have no more serious purpose. 

"JUDGE." 



Broadview, February and June, 1908. 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 



CHAPTER I. 

Partly Historical and Partly Prophetic. 

The summer of 1906 was about to begin. In America, with the 
Chicago meat scandal's malodorous details filling the space of the 
dailies and weeklies, and in England with the equally noisome details 
of the case of Gleason vs. Gleason, reported at full length daily in 
the Times. 

The year itself had so far been productive of many things ; some 
new; some startling; some destined to find a foothold and become 
lasting; others doomed to short lives and shorter memory. 

There was the Aero Club just formed at St. Cloud, destined to 
be the parent of many such and to remain long in the annals of flying 
machines. There was the motor omnibus, just introduced on the 
Strand and running amuck down Fleet street exciting the Times to 
long editorials of disparagement and calling forth long letters decry- 
ing the innovation from half of conservative England. It, too, was to 
last and be the forerunner of many such until it gradually supplant 
the older and more picturesque buses with the friendly drivers — 
every one a possible Barkis or Samuel Weller. 

Of those things which had first been introduced in 1906 and which 
were doomed to be ephemereal it is not necessary to speak ; their very 
nature offers sufficient excuse and this history will not concern itself 
with them ; but there was one thing in 1906 already attracting atten- 
tion and shortly to attract more and ever more attention until it would 
be remembered even when Aero Clubs and motor-omnibuses had 
passed out of mind. 

Already upon the side wheels of the steamboats plying up and 
down the Seine and upon the omnibuses driven along the boule- 
vards of Paris, its name appeared with strange and mysterious 
significance. All over Paris the eye was greeted by, "Amer Picon." 

5 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

It was blazoned upon the tall building and posted upon the low shack. 
It Avas everywhere that the energy of the advertiser could penetrate, 
and in every fashion his ingenuity could devise. 

Bryan was in London, planning, it was said, a descent on the 
Capitol at Washington and more immediately planning a speech for 
the Fourth of July dinner to be given at the Hotel Cecil on the Strand. 

Colonel J. S. Stickney, "Professional Paris Guide and Interpre- 
ter, ' ' his mind in an absinthian cloud, had within a week inadvertently 
stepped into an open cellar way at the Hotel Des Trois Gares, 1 Rue 
Jules Caesar, and so was absent from his accustomed stand at the 
general entrance of the Musee du Louvre, and, for a time, was seen 
to go about with his arm in a sling. 

And while Bryan in London planned a descent upon the Capitol 
at Washington, Wilson H. Brown and Alfred S. Miller, in Philadel- 
phia, were planning one upon London. Brown "had been to London 
before," as he was fond of saying. He knew just where to go when 
he got there, at what hotel to stop, and where to buy the best silks. 
Miller had also been there before and unfortunately had views of his 
own on the hotel question. 

For days, then, at this time, Miller besieged the Courts seeking to 
secure permission for a prolonged absence on the part of his client, 
who being "High Sheriff of Philadelphia County," was fictionally 
supposed always to remain therein. 

Up on the Hudson river, in the government academy, at West 
Point, an abnormally straight-backed cadet was watching the decline 
of a two-year period of continuous discipline and the approach of a 
long furlough. From time to time he would observe the height of the 
neighboring "hills" and mentally calculate the height of the Jung- 
frau and the feasibility of climbing the Matterhorn. He was anxious- 
ly awaiting news of the Sheriff's release from duty, for his name, too, 
was Miller, and his father had promised to take him abroad in com- 
pany with the Sheriff. 

Such, in general, was the condition of affairs in the early part of 
the summer of 1906 ; that is to say, in the latter part of the month of 
June of that year. 

That year may come to be considered notable because of many 
diverse happenings, but it needs little of historical perspective to 
recognize that the most significant symbol at the period of which we 
write was the rather inexpressive sign now appearing about all Paris 
— "Amer Picon." 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 



CHAPTER II. 

The Start and the Starters. 

And so it was that while the "City of Paris" cast off its moorings 
at the wharf below the Pont Royal in Paris on its way to St. Cloud and 
Suresnes, with "Amer Picon" blazoned on its side wheels, the "S. S. 
Cedrie," White Star Line, blew its shrill whistle and slowly dropped 
down the East River on the morning of June 28, 1906, bound for 
Liverpool. The Sheriff was on board; so was Miller, and so was 
Miller's son, the West Pointer— the man with the Matterhorn idea, 
whose Christian name was Edgar. 

Now Miller's son is the type of individual the police of Mulberry 
street term suspicious. His air of unconcern is too finished to be 
genuine, and his easy nonchalance too readily suggests the idea of a 
covert preparedness for sudden and precipitate flight. The wharf sleuth 
would instantly distrust him and regard him watchfully as one who 
has just done something or who is just about to do something. It is 
to these circumstances that the present scribe owes the fact that when 
the Cedrie cast off its moorings he was on board, for Miller engaged 
the attention of the Steamship Company detectives to such a degree 
that the scribe and some Pharisees escaped their vigilance and boarded 
the ship. Thus this history began. Europe would soon disclose to 
America its latest discovery, and mankind would soon have an aid in 
the solace and support, the comfort and refreshment, of the great 
Algerian root. 

A new epoch was due. The Moxie and Coca-Cola period was on 
the wane. Even that comforting old "wine agent," Omar Khayyam, 
failed to satisfy the human mind, and the tide of prohibition wa3 
heard moaning its desolate moan over the southern bar. 

Nature, that workman whose adz is revolution and whose plane is 
evolution, was not unmindful of the need of a thirst ridden people, nor 
of the shabby and decrepit condition of the old epoch, but as yet, our 
"man of the coming event" clung to the ideas of the effete period 
which was nearing its end. His note book contained the name of 
"Henry's" as the place in Paris for a Manhattan — information 
thoughtfully supplied on the eve of his departure by his friend, C. H. 
McCauley, together with other things which might have been termed 
supplies — had they been bottled. His mind was stocked with informa- 

7 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

tion concerning art galleries, and his ideas were of cathedrals, yet he 
was the agent selected for the manumission of a dusty-throated people 
in the bondage of the purveyor of mixed drinks. 

But of all this our scribe was unaware. The only fact engaging his 
attention was that he was off on a first voyage to Europe — off to enjoy 
the realization of the dreams of years. He was to walk up the streets 
which had echoed to the footsteps of so many characters in history and 
fiction, who had grown to be his familiars. He would spend an even- 
ing with the younger Pitt in the House of Commons or would prowl 
about the streets after dark in the company of DeQuincy, seeking that 
poor unfortunate of the night, who shared her poor fortune with De- 
Quincy and of whom he speaks with such gratitude. 

In the day time he would go about a country inhabited with the 
people of his imagination, or he would clothe those about him with the 
necessary purposes and costumes to fit into the picture of which the 
country was the background. He was on his first voyage and Brinton 
had given him a notebook in which to make memoranda of his im- 
pressions. The proper course to have pursued would have been to 
have thrown this notebook overboard the first day out as he did throw 
the ten-page manuscript of instructions also furnished by Brinton. 
But it is easier to throw away what some one else has written than 
what one has written one's self, and the new notebook was made the 
repository of several "impressions;" none as startling as a modern 
treatise on divorce, nor as Eddy-fying as a Christian Science "Bible;" 
and perhaps all of interest only to the scribe — but some of these same 
impressions will be found scattered about herein if any one pursues 
this history of the discovery of a people 's solace any farther. 

About the early impressions may be discovered something of the 
green, bilious tinge, incident to the first few days at sea; a salty, 
vigorous atmosphere seems, even to the scribe, to be lacking, and in its 
place is a little of the staleness of old bilge, water; but they are his 
impressions and as difficult to be gotten rid of as the political opinion 
of an old line Jacksonian democrat. 

Like the famous volume of Herr Teufelsdrockh these impressions 
have no method save such as may be produced through the adherence 
to the mere course of time. The combination is labyrinthic. Descrip- 
tion overlaps speculation and the whole is indented with the character- 
istics of four individuals, utterly different in every essential. 

The note book starts with those impressions crowding fast upon 
one another, while the boat is leaving the dock and dropping slowly 
down stream under the care of the pilot. 

8 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

It is then that the first voyager finds his new situation giving birth 
to ideas of those left behind and the new faces crowding all about 
him. He gains a new perspective from which he may view his friends 
and he almost concludes that the chief charm of going away is the 
presence of friends at the point of departure or their assistance either 
in person or by letter in the act of going. He would be a poor sort, 
indeed, whose heart did not warm and best feelings go out to his 
friends on such an occasion. He has not yet had time, perhaps, to 
fully refleef on those who worked silently but unselfishly to pack him 
off. All that comes later during the days at sea, when to sit gazing 
out at the sky line and reflect on these things will, if homesickness be 
impossible, make home and its concomitants very desirable, for those 
to whom home is but an idea are the most readily susceptible to its 
symbols. The mute evidence of a kindly thought — a pocket bible 
hastily included in the packing— what a poignant sense of loneliness 
will it not engender, a hunger for human ties and affections — a hunger 
so tea) that it grips the heart and makes for a blankness too hard al- 
most to bear, so that one almost feels inclined to dislike the persons 
about — they seem so happy. 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 



CHAPTER III. 

Other Voyagers. 

When an ocean liner heads toward the sea and gradually leaves 
the home dock behind, is a good time to catch characteristic glimpses 
of the passengers with whom one is to spend the next six or seven days. 

The emotional linger on deck along the rail and keep their gaze 
fastened upon the dock fast melting into a shore line. Their thoughts 
are so unselfishly for the one left behind that they jostle one another 
and obscure one another's view, oblivious of others even in the moment 
of generous self-forgetfulness. Here and there the scene separates 
itself for you and you are able to note individual instances. For the 
first time you become aware that the lady in brown, whose coming on 
board you secretly welcomed, is the mother of the little boy with whom 
she is accompanied. You watch with displeasure the excitable French- 
man who flung a rose, after having kissed it an extravagant number of 
times, to a man on the dock. He is settling his necktie and pluming 
himself, and you observe him ogling the lady in brown and you are un- 
kindly amused. Except the Frenchman, however, the people taken 
separately are hardly amusing. The types differ, but all are known. 
It is mostly a holiday crowd, a little too evidently pleasure-bound to 
possess much human interest. It will be different with the steerage 
passengers, you say, and wander aft. 

There you see again the old man, whom you saw but lately bid- 
ding farewell to a woman in shabby clothes. He sits apart on a piece 
of baggage, his cheeks still wet with tears. He has an indescribably 
pathetic air of not knowing where next to turn or what to do, and 
sits gazing helplessly and dumbly up the river at the disappearing 
dock. You desire to go down and talk with the man ; something in 
his neat but shabby appearance marks him out from his fellow 
voyagers. His hair is thin and gray ; his face wrinkled and pale, and 
a stubbly growth of gray beard somehow seems to add to his general 
air of dejection. He is wearing his best clothes, you infer, and 
though it is almost summer and the day is very warm, you note that 
the clothes are heavy and obviously winter ones, and this speaks 
strongly of poverty and adds itself as a pathetic fact to the whole pic- 
ture — the old-fashioned trunk, the dejected figure, old and gray and 
apart, seated in the steerage. 

10 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

And then, when you attempt to reach the old man, you realize 
the steerage differences and distinctions, for the way thereto is guarded 
and shut off, and your visit must be deferred until you get the purser's 
permission. The visit will never be paid, though the old man will be- 
come ;i melancholy memory of the voyage. 

At the purser's window, you will find mostly young girls intent 
upon securing last messages and steamer letters. They keep the 
purser busy, so you descend to the saloon; and surrounding the 
steward in the saloon you find the more elderly and more materially 
selfish providing themselves with choice seats for the voyage. 

Shortly everything will settle down into routine, but for a time 
you find yourself being compared openly with a passenger list as if 
the inquisitive person could find some connection between you and any 
one of two hundred names upon the list. You even find yourself try- 
ing to pick out the persons to fit certain names you have noted as com- 
ing from Philadelphia, and as you are hoping that you may have a 
seat at table with congenial people, Miller comes along. Now, you are 
in the habit of passing Miller in the city many times a year without 
experiencing any particular emotions, but meeting him on shipboard, 
when you are just beginning to feel somewhat alone, is an entirely dif- 
ferent matter. So it also seems to be with Miller, and he and you shake 
hands and talk; both at the same time at a great rate. And then 
Miller proposes that you meet Brown and the West Pointer, and that 
all four obtain seats at the same table. And so, finally, it is arranged 
and you are mighty glad to go back and inspect your stateroom. 

The stateroom is your first experience. Chesterton in his essay 
on "The Institution of the Family," says that it would be very ex- 
citing to be snowed up in one's own street. He speaks of the "fierce 
varieties and uncompromising divergencies of men." He says with 
fine, stoic fatalism that ' ' We make our friends ; we make our enemies ; 
but God makes our next door neighbor. ' ' But in selecting an environ- 
ment calculated to inspire alarm he need not to have confined himself 
to a snowed-up street ; nor to one 's next door neighbor if he was seek- 
ing for human variety. If he wanted an example of contact with 
' ' fierce varieties " or if he wanted to name a place where one could find 
men uncompromisingly divergent and also have a place equally with- 
out the power of the individual and within the power of a humorous 
and careless Providence, he might have selected the cabin of an ocean 
liner. Here, certainly, our companions are a "surprise." The man 
in the upper berth is a " bolt from the blue. ' ' The man in the lower 
adjoining your own, even if he has only a tremendous snore, fills you 

11 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

with vague misgivings as to whether he may not have other alarming 
characteristics. 

Your method of inspecting your stateroom is to inspect the be- 
longings of the two absent strangers who are to share the room with 
you. This inspection and a conversation with your bedroom steward 
supplies you with the information that "lower one" is a Yale profes- 
sor and "upper three" a Hawaiian, which fact you regard as sinister. 
Later you learn that "upper three" has a habit of smoking a pipe in 
bed, and that he is afflicted with some strange asthmatic ailment which 
causes him to go through all the evolutions of a person choking to 
death. You learn this the first night out when you are awakened by 
the most horrible and gruesome noises coming from "upper three" 
and wake suddenly with a feeling that ' ' lower one ' ' is choking ' ' upper 
three" to death. You remember the pipe smoking of "upper three" 
earlier in the evening and turn over to the wall smiling with malignant 
satisfaction and gradually the noises die into gurgles and gasps, com- 
ing more and more slowly and at greater intervals, and the sound is 
soothing and you fall asleep again to strange dreams in which "lower 
one" figures unpleasantly. 

Those who go abroad in staterooms exclusively their own should 
read Chesterton and conclude to be more alive and venturesome and 
then they should trust themselves to the haphazard selection of the 
agent of a steamship company. 

The voyage is an entrance into a new world ; the taking up, as it 
were, of residence in a village, where inhabitants have been made up 
by a sort of casual selection resulting in a general representation from 
all quarters of the United States with a sprinkling of a foreign savor. 

And the village would be run upon no mean scale, as a talk with 
the Purser indicates. The Cedric, he tells you, is 700 feet long and 
sixty-five feet across the beam. She carries about 1,100 passengers, 
and to do so carries an extraordinary amount of foodstuffs. There are 
ninety barrels of flour on board, 350 pounds of yeast, 1,300 pounds of 
butter, 1,700 dozen eggs, 3,600 pounds of mutton and lamb, 6,000 
pounds of fowl, to say nothing of the tons of beef and water, many 
bottles of water and liquors. 

Nearly 600 employes are ready to serve and guard the passengers. 

Wandering about the village is a pleasure. Four decks are avail- 
able for strolls, and each one peopled with fellow voyagers, talking, 
reading, gazing out at sea, or nodding to one another. As in a village, 
there is the gradual formation of groups of varied types. The people 
fall into alignment, so to speak, with one another. Here accidental 

12 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

neighborhood at table, or the chance adjoining of steamer chairs, or 
proximity of staterooms, results in acquaintances and groupings, as 
singular and as violently varied as may possibly be found in any vil- 
lage. Zest is added to one's every movement, and each moment of the 
first few days has the lively interest born of the nearness and possible 
approach of some one new and strange, but surely interesting, and, 
perhaps, romantically attractive. 

At the table with our four friends, the little mischievous god of 
chance, abandoning for the nonce his prankish humor, had permitted 
a grouping singularly free from ambiguous traits or absurd differ- 
ences. Coming mostly from the same city, and having friends in 
common, no strained adjustment is needed to make Miller and his 
party fit in with the others at table, so that the net result will go far 
to help in making a pleasant voyage. 

At the head of the table is seated Harrison S. Morris with little 
Katharine, his six-year-old daughter, on his right, and Mrs. Morris 
on his left. Grouped about the other end Mr. La Boiteaux and party 
sit. The whole party Philadelphia^ except Dr. J. 0. O'Reilly and 
wife, hailing from Boston and just entered upon their honeymoon— 
a fact soon extracted by Mrs. Morris from the confiding husband. 

It might as well be said now. The fact is too glaring to be over- 
looked and its consequences too far reaching to warrant any slight. 
Mrs. Morris is a leach — a gimlet, a veritable auger. She fastens upon 
one and sucks up the most deeply buried confidence. She sets to work 
and bores through the most hardened reserve. She covers one, so to 
speak, and then absorbs one's little story like a sponge. She almost 
succeeded in getting the confidence of Brown, and thus breaking down 
the caution of a lifetime. She reduced the present scribe to the con- 
dition of a desiccated orange after the blight of an early Florida 
frost. And Miller, Sr., spent hours in pouring into her sympathetic 
ear his ever-increasing wonderment at the inherent wickedness of the 
world, and the strong propensity for gambling in the male sex. 

An observing bachelor — and bachelors are life's best philoso- 
phers — remarks that the rule surest to obtain in the strange selection 
resulting in man and wife is: "The most charming woman to the 
least deserving man." 

The rule had not been unobserved in the case of Harrison Morris. 
Green overcoat, bicycle shoes, slouch hat and a certain readiness for a 
deck promenade, coupled with an equal readiness in the expression of 
opinions would serve to make up Morris if we subtract his devotion to 
Mrs. Morris, which was only equaled by his devotion to Crabb's 

13 



PHILADELPHIA NS A B ROAD 

Robertson's Diary. His ability somehow to swing along side one in a 
long, deck tramp and contrive in some silent, indefinable way to make 
for quiet and soul satisfying companionship and the sense he gave one 
of a ripe, observant, though sometimes acrid, judgment of men. Then, 
too, Morris had the right sort of knowledge, respecting the right sort 
of places in London and Paris. Not in Philistine haunts nor the cen- 
ters of the blatant tourists, but the spots just off the main track ; the 
quiet shallows beside the turbulent stream, where the best sort of 
times are to be had. We have forgotten the names of all save the 
Hotel Dieu Donnee, but we have not forgotten the look of the streets 
on which they may be found, and we have a delightful, vague recol- 
lection, of the face of one particular head waiter — solicitous and con- 
cerned even over Miller 's querulous remarks. 

With these folks at table, and with Nutty and Worthington wait- 
ing for one in the smoking room, it was not difficult to keep the blue 
devil, loneliness, well astern of one's consciousness. 



14 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

CHAPTER IV. 
More Voyagers. 

It was Nutty who discovered "Morning Glory" to us, and, al- 
though it was soon discovered that "Morning Glory" went in for 
Christian Science, yet she went in for so many other more companion- 
able things that we quite forgave her — that is, every one did but 
Brown. Brown, with an unselfish disregard of time, and with an 
enthusiasm almost juvenile, devoted himself to bringing "Morning 
Glory ' ' back to the orthodox, and teaching her the fallacies at the root 
of Christian Science. He promenaded the deck in her company — in 
the company of "Morning Glory," who had all the grace and charm 
which seems to hang about the priestesses of strange faiths, and while 
we all looked on we felt only that if earnestness and persistence 
counted Brown would prevail. 

It was Nutty, too, who taught us to play "Honest John." Equal- 
ly as fascinating as "Morning Glory" we found this new game. In- 
deed, it was more so, for more than one could play the game at the 
same time. Nutty taught the game but Worthington knew it better — 
oh, a hundred dollars ' worth better ! But Nutty had all the ardor of 
a new convert in spite of the cool nonchalance of Worthy, the old 
hand. And so it was that the village had its bad boy. 

Who taught us how to guess the run 
And bet a five pun note for fun? 

Why, Nutty. 
Who never once was seen to shun 
The bottle where was kept the bun? 

Why, Nutty. 

And then there was P. E. Bright and wife. Bright, the purveyor 
of bottled Fifth Avenue Hotel cocktails — not produced until the third 
day out. Who will ever forget the occasion? The solemn march to 
the stateroom, the hushed expectancy, the slow experimental sip, and 
then the sigh of satisfied delight. Brown was almost reduced to tears, 
and Bright had won a place in the memory of his friends from which 
nothing will ever displace him. Bright was said to have a "White" 
steamer on board, but his story was received with good-natured in- 
dulgence, much as Brown's story about the trunk. Brown appeared 
for three days with monotonous regularity in the same outfit. Not 

15 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

even a different necktie to allay the suspicion of a scanty wardrobe. 
To every one who would listen he told a story, strangely lacking in 
circumstantial detail, about having lost a trunk, and to give certain 
color to the yarn, Brown spent several hours each day rummaging be- 
tween decks with the purser "in search of the missing trunk." An 
inquest, duly summoned, sat upon the question of the disappearance 
of the trunk and evidence was taken on both sides and after delibera- 
tion the inquest found that Brown never had a trunk. The finding 
was coupled with a recommendation to the mercy of Brown's friends, 
and a request to help make up a wardrobe. And so Brown became 
resplendent and strutted about in his borrowed plumes beside "Morn- 
ing Glory." 

Perchance, 'twas because his new necktie was red, 

Perchance, 'twas a fault in the shape of his head. 

"Perchance, 'twas a fault in themselves; I am bound not 

To say; this I know — that these two creatures found not 

In each other. some sign they expected to find 

Of a something unnamed in the heart or the mind, 

And, missing it, each felt a right to complain 

Of a sadness which each found no word to explain. ' ' 

But the White steamer duly appeared at Liverpool, and later at 
London, to furnish a happy day along the Thames in a ride with 
Bright to the races at Kingston, and even Brown's trunk, despite the 
inquest, appeared in proper person when the voyage was nearly at 
an end. 



16 



P H I L A D E L P II I A N S ABROAD 



CHAPTER V. 

Episodes and Eternitiks. 

Meanwhile Fourth of July was approaching, and patriotism was 
swelling in the bosom of our friends. The West Pointer awoke him- 
self in the morning by whistling the first bars of the "Star Spangled 
Banner," and Miller began to go over the almost forgotten lines of an 
ancienl flag-raising speech in the artfully concealed hope that he 
would be called upon for a few remarks in (lie saloon. (We hope to 
be understood as meaning the dining saloon.) 

In the smoking room an entertainment was planned and a pro- 
gramme of "sports" was arranged. 

Shakespeare was speaking of sack and not of patriotism when he 
spoke of the "Warming of the blood, which before, cold and settled, 
left the liver white and pale, which is the badge of pusillanimity and 
cowardice," but how inapt and futile are Shakespeare's clumsy figures 
of speech, how scanty and mean, to picture the reckless daring, the 
fate-scorning courage of the Judge, who flung down his challenge be- 
fore the menacing countenance of the West Pointer and engaged him 
for a boxing bout before the ship's company on the approaching 
Fourth of July. 

Imes Homer furnish any action more brave? Picture the scene. 
A colling, uncertain ship. The crowding, blood-thirsty passengers. 
A "cabined and confined" ring chalked upon the deck. No avenue 
of escape save over the ship's side. But the picture is not real. The 
bout never came off. The challenge had been given under the warm- 
ing influence of patriotism and a modicum of "sack." The gloves 
were wanting — pillows were not a fitting substitute, and the celebra- 
tion of the Fourth was left, as is the custom, to the youngsters. Only 
a concert was given, of which one's only recollection is the recitation 
by Miss Alice Anderton of the triumph of oiie Giuseppe, whose enemy 
had stripped him of everything 

"But notta Carlotta, 
You betcha life notta, 
I gotta." 

The concert was a great success, attended by all of the first pas- 
senger list. The proceeds went to the "Seamen's Home," but there 
was a much nearer object for sympathy had the passengers only 

17 



MMLADELPHIANS ABROAD 

known, for while they played and sang in their well-appointed saloon, 
there Lay within a few yards of them, below in the steerage, an old 
voyager apon life's track engaged in his final struggle with the grim 
destroyer. 

We had marked him when he came on board and set him apart 
from tlif rest. He seemed different somehow, perhaps because the im- 
print of the tragic was already upon him, and as he sat upon his old- 
fashioned trunk he may have been surrounded by a prescient atmos- 
phere which we did not recognize — though he was a creature already 
marked of destiny. 

h appears that he had kept aloof from the rest of his fellow pas- 
sengers and nothing was known save his name and destination, and 
that he had been accompanied to the steamer by his daughter, whose 
name and whereabouts were unknown. And now he was dead. He 
had died alone upon his poor straw bed and his burial was left to 
alien hands. 

To the sailors it was only a matter for superstitious comment. To 
the officers it was a matter requiring the filling up of several blank 
certificates — a needless formality, to be followed by one equally need- 
less — the burial service at sea. 

At midnight, below decks, the service was read. The body lay 
sewed up in a sack, together with lumps of coal and a piece or two 
of iron, sparingly supplied from the ship's store. We placed upon it 
a rose on behalf of the daughter back somewhere across the sea and 
then turned away while the sack was thrust through a port hole and 
the body fell with a splash into the sea. 

Forward every one was sleeping peacefully and the Cedric pushed 
onward in the night, huge, powerful, insentient; partaking somewhat 
of life in its pitiless onrush and a little of fate in its complete abandon- 
ment of the old man out there in the dark and the deep. 



18 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 



CHAPTER VI. 

England. 

Meanwhile, we wore covering nearly four hundred miles a day 
and presently Queenstown was heralded as coming into view at 4 
o'clock on the morning of the next day. And now Miller began to 
show evidence of the interest which he was to manifest during the rest 
of the trip. Miller's 200 avoirdupois encased a romantic and poetic 
soul. He loved to discuss the various styles of architecture and cite 
and describe examples, and he insisted upon sharing his enthusiasm 
and the burdens it imposed. 

At 4 o'clock of a chilly, damp morning he routed the West Pointer 
and the Judge and haled them on deck to view the distant southern 
shore of Ireland. Sea gulls circled overhead and cawed their derision 
of the three shivering enthusiasts. 

Queenstown was still hours away, and Ireland was a faint streak 
just discernible off to port. The West Pointer went back grumbling 
to bed, but th6 Judge, meekly dissembling, pretended to see through a 
pair of binoculars all that Miller said should be seen. Not even the 
subsequent recollection of fresh, luscious strawberries, taken on board 
a1 Queenstown, will serve to erase the memory of the utter wretched- 
ness of that chill and melancholy morning and of Miller's tales 
of his first voyage, and the charms incident to a sunrise at sea. The 
sun didn't rise. Nothing rose but the prow of the steamer in unison 
with a breakfastless stomach. 

The next day we were in England. 

In England, the place of extortionate tips, 
Oh, fate, keep the swear word away from our lips! 
And when we're in France, please cause us to flee 
From the charms of delightful, disgusting Paree. 

It was late evening when we came up the Mersey, the whole pas- 
senger list crowding along the rail to catch the first glimpse 
of Liverpool. From afar we could see the lights of the city, and as 
we approached nearer many mistook the numerous lights of a pleasure 
park, just below Liverpool, for the city itself. 

At night is, without doubt, the best time to land at Liverpool, or, 
better still, to come along side without landing, for landing at night 

19 



1'IIILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

has many unnecessary inconveniences not to be measured with the 
comfort to be derived from spending the night on board. But the 
Bight of the city is tempting enough after nine days of broad ocean, 
and the lights making vague and mysterious the outlines of the houses 
and taller buildings and setting off the huge blackness of the country 
beyond, and the hum of another busy continent coming as something 
in -w to ears now accustomed and familiar only with the vibrating 
Bcrew, all operate to create an impatience which will hardly brook the 
delay of making fast the landing stage. 

Every one is saying good-bye to every one else or straining their 
eyes trying to distinguish the faces of waiting friends. Mrs. Morris 
is culpably alert, intent upon smuggling little Katharine past quaran- 
tine, for Catharine has been mysteriously missing from the table the 
last few days, and cruel rumor whispers of chicken pox. 

Nutty has been able to open communication with his Paris agent 
on the wharf and basely neglects "Morning Glory." And presently 
of the passengers pour down the gangway and leave the ship to 
the few stragglers who have decided to await the morning before land- 
ing. With tins few may he found Brown, Miller, et al., and they are 
soon stowed away in their staterooms, getting the last long sleep prior 
to the very active sightseeing trip which is to begin with the morning. 

It was July 8 when the party landed at Liverpool. The boat had 
dropped down stream and had been "docked" in the course of the 
night and in the morning she lay high and dry in dock, some five feet 
above the surface of the river, exposed to view her full length and 
looking every inch the fine craft she is. 

A t the dock a cab was taken for the ferry landing where the party 
purposed taking the Birkenhead ferry, for it had been decided over 
night to make Chester our first objective point. We drove for a half 
hour along the Liverpool "docks" and warehouses worthy the name 
and unlike any such in America; but along their walls, a circumstance 
a Is,, unlike anything in America, although it was now 9 o'clock in the 
morning, could be seen form after form of man or boy huddled in 
sleep upon the bare pavement with coat drawn up over head and 
misery and poverty speaking in every line of their prostrate figures. 
It was then we began to be country proud, and not even Westminster 
Abbey succeeded in abating that pride. 

Prom Birkenhead to Chester by train was a trip rife with new 
subjects for observation every minute. The trains first of all with 
their guards, and their first, second and third-class compartments. The 
light rails, the lighl coaches and lack of road crossings, the passing 

20 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

country, something different in the hedges, in the very grass. The 
sheep and the cows, all new and only strangely and somehow familiarly 
resembling similar cattle at home. We were fresh for impressions 
and they crowded in at every curve of the rail. We were now positive 
we were in England and now for the first time understood Browning — 
two lines of his at least, not to be too extravagant : 

"Oh! to be in England 
Now that April 's there. ' ' 

We were tempted to alight at some station, oh ! anywhere, now we 
were in England; but Miller persuaded us to wait for Chester and we 
are glad we did so. 

If Chester is to be remembered by us only because it was there we 
met Charlie Wake, yet it will never fade from our recollection. But 
Chester is remembered for many other reasons. It was good to lunch 
at the Grosvenor and have shandy gaff. It is almost a dream that we 
had pigeon pie accompanied by the ever-present inability to use the 
aspirate. ' ' 'Ave a cup of corf e, sir ? " "I '11 take some milk. " " Aint 
got no milk, sir. " " 'Ave some tea, sir ? " 

Of course, Miller wanted to get right out and see the Cathedral. 
His needs were always immediate and in every trifling delay he saw 
nothing but a waste of good, "sightseeing" time, but, happily for us 
all, Brown held him back to meet and hear Charlie Wake exclaim over 
the remarkable favor of the gods in putting Brown and him in Chester 
at the same time, and then it developed that Wake had a big Thomas 
car at the door and soon we were beside it meeting Mrs. Erbacher and 
her son, and presently we were going from point to point all 
about the town, breaking speed laws and tooting our horns beneath 
the noses of English bobbies. The motor car had its usual 
demoralizing influence, and it was not long before Brown and Miller 
announced an intention of accompanying Wake and party to War- 
wick, leaving the West Pointer and the Judge to really see Chester and 
then start north for the land of the scones and the salmon. After the 
party separated the West Pointer and the Judge walked around the 
delightfully crooked walls, climbed the steps at its uneven points, 
crossed its arches and gazed upon the old ramparts and battlements, 
dreaming of the "glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was 
Rome." 

And then came services in the cathedral and afterward an exami- 
nation of the crypt in the company of two beadles very much like 
those of James' "a couple of those grotesque creatures, a la 

21 



1* II I LADE LP II I A NS ABROAD 

ens. whom one finds squeezed into every cranny of English civili- 
zation, Bcraping a thin subsistence like mites in a mouldy cheese." 

We were actually disappointed to find thai we could go by trolley 

Chester oul to Eton Hall. It was the best example we were 

destined to see of English landed estates; but most of our impression 

of ii was r ived from Baedeker, and not from any visual images 

upon otn- retinas, for after we had wandered through the gardens and 
had gained some idea of the mansion itself, we were u;iven to under- 
stand that on Sundays the grounds and hall were not open to visitors. 
The same rule obtained with regard to Hawarden Castle, which we 

d only because of Gladstone's connection therewith, and not with 
a new to adding to our impressions of landed estates, for the walk 
through the gardens of Lion had been all sufficient in that respect. 

The mere size of the property occupied as "his scat'' by the Duke 
of Westminster (though we were told at Chester that the young Duke 
had only visited the Hall twice in as many years), evoked a wish for 
the 

"Time thai was, ere England's grief began, 

When every rood of ground maintained its man." 

The remembrance of those huddled figures upon the pavements 
of Liverpool had a queer way of coming forward in contrast with those 
carefully nurtured and tended trees and flowers of the young Duke's, 
whom rumor said was hardly a young man of promise, and somehow 
the contrast was dispiriting. Such estates, however, go to make up 
England a complete and unmitigated England — the England that is. 
England that need proffer no excuses for herself. 

"If England was what England seems. 
How quick we'd ehuek 'er — but she ain't." 

But a far prettier sight than Eton Hall may lie seen of a Sunday 

i n near Chester, and we were off to see it. 

It must have been chance that directed our footsteps to the River 

and then to a boatman who was easily persuaded to part with a 
light "working boat" at the rate of 6d per hour. It was not until 
Miller was busy demonstrating the oarsmanship of a West Pointer and 
the banks of the Dee had began to flow down beside us, that actual 
and real English life was unfolded to view. Baedeker is almost silent 
on the subject of the Dee, but we recommend it as one of the principal 
sights of old Chester. Go in the late afternoon, as we did, and row 
slowly upstream, past every manner of small craft, each carrying its 

22 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

absorbingly interesting freight. It is all English to the core, and every 
variety of English is there from 'Arry and 'Arriett, boisterous in evi- 
dencing the pleasure they are having, to Algernon and Angelina, too 
evidently intent upon the eternal ego — the only really "class-con- 
scious" sort of persons we know. 

As we rowed along, upon either bank of the river were seen well- 
worn paths traversed by man and maid, for it was Sunday and the 
day was ideal, and all Chester seemed to have left the town to foolish 
tourists and to be out there really enjoying England. 

It was difficult to leave this scene, even though Scotland and its 
lakes beckoned, but the evening found us upon the Great Western 
bound for Crewe where we had some insight into the stupidity and 
insolence of an English railway "inspector" before receiving our 
first impression of an English sleeping-car, a thing we soon desig- 
nated "a contraption," in comparison with the same sort of thing in 
America. 



23 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 



CHAPTER VII. 

Scotland. 

When we climbed out of the sleeper it was 8 o'clock the next 
morning and we were in Glasgow, the modern city of Great Britain 
and one well calculated to awaken envy in the breast of a Philadel- 
phian on account of its admirable water system, its cheap and rapid 
transit, to say nothing of its gas works — all arguments for municipal 
ownership ; or so Brown told us afterward and produced heavy-look- 
ing books to prove it. 

Our schedule gave us very little time for Glasgow, but with the aid 
of a hansom and a willing driver we were able to visit the cathedral 
and its neighboring necropolis; the university and the art museum — 
the only memory of which is Whistler's portrait of Thomas Carlyle, 
though we regret our inability to recall its Rubens and Murillos. 

By 9 :30 we were en route for the Trossachs by way of Stirling 
and Bannockburn. It was not in Glasgow, but in passing these two 
places, evocative as they are of we know not what ideas of Douglas 
and Bruce and old Scottish chiefs, that the beauty and charm and 
poetry of Scotland came upon us with a rush — with such a rush that 
whole stanzas of the long-neglected "Lady of the Lake" was ours 
once more — ours, not to serve as the subject of a "language lesson," 
but as a guide along the path of the chase and over the trackless lakes. 

After Bannockburn came Callender, where we changed from the 
railway to the f ront-near-the-driver seats of a well-appointed tally-ho, 
drawn by four good horses. And soon we were driving through the 
most picturesque and charming country, passing Coilantogle Ford, 
the Brig of Turk, the distant Ben Ledi and coming in the midst of the 
Trossachs upon Loch Achray, above whose banks we had lunch at the 
Trossachs Hotel. The lunch furnished our first introduction to Scot- 
tish scones. They were served with cold meat and Chesshire cheese 
and were eagerly devoured — perhaps because the drive had created 
' ' soldiers ' appetites ; ' ' however it may be, the notes made at the time 
dilate upon the extraordinary and peculiar virtues of scones, but 
without that minute description of either their general appearance or 
their general characteristics, such as a statement of virtues would seem 
to require, and now we find ourself able to recall the salient features 
of a scone no more than we can call to mind our first impressions of 

24 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

a peach. And so we mourn the loss of one of life's best experiences. 

At 1 o'clock we again mounted the coach and were driven to 
Loch Katrine. We had passed along the finest of the chase described 
by Scott; we had passed the place where Fitz-James lamented over the 
loss of his "gallant gray," and we now stood, or fancied we stood, on 
the spot where he winded his horn and called from Ellens Isle the 
Lady of the Lake. 

The day was perfect — neither too warm nor too cool. A slight 
breeze was blowing with only sufficient force to cause the waters of 
the lake to wash, in little white-capped waves across the "silver 
strand." Before us stretched the lake in nine miles of beauty, all 
around us were cliffs and crags, mounds and rocks, "confusedly 
hurled— the fragments of an earlier world," while all about 

"The wild rose, eglantine and broom, 
Wafted around their rich perfume; 
The birch trees wept in fragrant balm, 
The aspens slept beneath the calm; 
The silver light, with quivering glance, 
Played on the water's still expanse." 

And on onr left, Ben Venue, ridge on ridge, rose stern and steep 
to its 2,400 feet height, while farther to the left, and in the hazy dis- 
tance, we could decry Ben Lomond and plan its ascent. 

But now we climbed a neighboring cliff and gazed back along the 
way we had come— back to Monans rill, where "at eve the stag had 
drunk its fill," and back to "Glenartney's hazel shade" where "deep 
his midnight lair (he'd) made" and we forgot the tourists gathers 1 
below waiting for the boat and soon were back to the days of the 
Pibroch of Donnil Dhn ; to the days of the war-pipe and pennon and 
were only recalled by the shrill pipe of the Princess May's whistle 
calling us for the ride down the lake to Stronachlachar. 

The captain of the Princess May, a bewhiskered and good- 
natured, but canny Scot, employed most of the time of the trip in 
dilating, to young Miller, on the arduous nature of a climb up Ben 
Lomond, of its marshes and fogs and mists, at this season, and of the 
possibility of getting lost at nightfall— and so it was that Miller be- 
came convinced of the necessity of climbing the mountain. 

The steamer was well crowded with tourists, mostly English, off 
on a few days' trip, and when we reached Stronachlacher, the coaches 
were required to make two trips to carry all the passengers over to 
Inversnaid. 

25 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

While we were waiting to be taken over to Inversnaid, we made 
the acquaintance of Donald Ferguson, the proprietor of Stronach- 
lacher Hotel, a Scotsman to as full an extent as the name would imply. 
He talked to us of Rob Roy and Glengyle and told us of the graveyard 
of Clan Gregor and then alas! took us in to see his "picture" postal 
cards — a modern innovation we felt had no place in this romantic 
place, though Miller fell upon the postals and straightway was ad- 
dressing a dozen or more to different persons in the "States." 

Soon we were again on a coach covering the five and a half miles 
over the ridge from Loch Katrine to Loch Lomond and making a 
descent of some four hundred feet. Then came bread and marmalade 
— fresh from Dundee in huge crocks, and the inevitable tea ; and 
presently we were embarked upon a side-wheeler and heading down 
the lake, followed by numerous circling gulls, to whom some of the 
passengers threw chunks of bread that they might see the gulls swoop 
down and catch the bread in midair. The gulls were in keeping with 
the wild surroundings and helped to a realization of the size of this 
twenty-five-mile-long Scottish lake. But we did not cover half 
this length, for Rowardennon came into view and pleased our fancy. 

Brinton's "notes" had stated that in Scotland we should stop 
and spend the night at the first place which struck our fancy. It was 
the only bit of Brinton's advice which had about it the true ring of 
experience, and here was a place at the foot of Ben Lomond fanciful 
and romantic enough to appeal irresistably, "and, besides," Miller 
argued, "we can climb the mountain before dinner." The argument 
almost dissuaded, but we had asked the captain to stop and the boat 
was nearing the landing, and presently we found ourselves, with our 
traps, standing alone upon a deserted pier. 

It was several hundred yards to the little "Rowardennon Inn," 
and when we announced there that it was our purpose to ascend Ben 
Lomond that night, we sprung a small surprise upon the natives, 
whose protests only added to Miller's desire, and at 5:40 p. m. the 
ascent was begun. 

We left our coats in the hotel and only wore sweaters, which we 
soon wished we had left behind for sweaters soon became unnecessary 
and only articles to be doffed and carried, as we vigorously pushed on 
up Ben Lomond. 

"We'll break the record," said Miller, "and get down again be- 
fore the natives think we are up." 

Here and there as we ascended, our pathway was disputed by 
a menacing and sinister-looking ram, which we were compelled to 

26 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

stone before we could proceed, and the farther up we went the more 
the rams and sheep increased. Not a shepherd was to be seen and 
everything went to make for solitude and quiet — the occasional tinkle 
of a sheep 's bell was the only sound and when our feet loosened a stone 
and it rolled down the mountain side, the silence was intensified. Half 
way up, the path became lost in a morass, and we spent some minutes 
in trying to find its continuation, only to become aware that we had 
even lost track of the path by which we had come. Darkness began to 
fall and the pessimistic croakings of the Rowardennon folks began to 
occur to us, but Miller professed the most intimate acquaintance with 
mountain climbing and we pushed forward. 

At 7 :10 we reached the summit of Ben Lomond, 3,192 feet above 
sea level. We were in the clouds and also in the path of an icy blast, 
and were very glad for the protection of sweaters. 

The extreme cold prevented our remaining long to enjoy the view, 
though most of the country was still discernible beneath us. On all 
sides stretched the hills and lakes and rivers of Scotland. To the 
east we could decry the Firth of Forth and even fancied we could see 
Edinburgh. Off to the south we could see the Clyde and at our feet 
stretched Loch Lomond dotted with islands — a sight well worth the 
climb, but we only remained at the summit fifteen minutes and began 
to descend at 7 :25. 

We ran the first mile and then we slid down part of the way 
seated on boards and sliding over the rough heather, and at 8 :30 we 
had finished the descent and made a new record for Rowardennon, be- 
sides furnishing the subject for a dispute between the natives, for some 
held that we never reached the summit of the mountain and privily 
examined us, each apart from the other, to see if our descriptions of 
the summit corresponded with the fact. The dispute may be still 
raging. We left the disputants in active conflict to go off and take a 
swim in Loch Lomond, to be followed by a supper of cold, fresh 
salmon, just taken that afternoon from the lake. 

The next morning we took the boat to Balloch and then the train 
to Glasgow and Edinburgh, arriving in Edinburgh one hour after 
leaving Glasgow. 

The fortifications at Edinburgh engaged the attention of Miller, 
and we had hardly established ourselves at the Royal Hotel before 
we were rolling off in a hansom to the castle with its "mons Meg" 
and seven gateways. 

It was our first sight of a moat and of a portcullis and perhaps 
our enthusiasm was unpleasing to the guide— at least he took toward 

27 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

us a condescending attitude and referred to the different parts of 
the castle with an air which plainly said, "The old thing is nothing 
much to speak of. ' ' When we spoke of the size of the rock upon which 
the castle stands — a mass twenty-seven acres at the base and eleven 
acres on top — the canny old Scot opined that "it was summat of a 
cinder." 

From the castle we went to Parliament House where the supreme 
law courts of Scotland sit. The courts were reached only after pass- 
ing down the "Great Hall" which at the time was thronged with 
"advocates" and solicitors and their clients, walking up and down or 
standing apart conversing in low tones — the advocates be-wigged and 
be-gowned, and some of the younger-looking ones pacing back and 
forth in a very pompous manner, indeed. We were sorry to note that 
the wigs were all of a shabby and mean character, and, indeed, most 
of the lawyers were a shabby, hungry-looking lot, almost as hungry 
and meagre-looking as the students we saw later at the university, 
though they all had an air of being terribly in earnest. 

Beyond the "Great Hall" was the "Outer House," a court room 
where one judge sat listening to a divorce case in which the testimony 
differed not one whit from the sort of testimony heard in an Ameri- 
can court trying the same cause. Beyond the "Outer House" we 
found three lords sitting in the "Inner Court" listening to an argu- 
ment on the question of a covenant running with the land. It was 
"My Lud" this and "My Lud" that; and "If your Ludship please," 
all in the most delightful Scottish brogue. Much more time was given 
to the argument of the legal question than would be afforded in this 
country, and the most striking fact was the uniform courtesy with 
which the judges listened to the attorneys and the dignified way in 
which they interrupted an argument to interject their own thought on 
the question. 

But we hadn 't come over for law courts and soon we were driving 
down High street past "John Knox's House" to Holyrood Palace, 
where we saw the rooms of Mary, Queen of Scots (and thought them 
unattractive enough), and saw, or thought we saw the stain on the 
floor made by the blood of Rizzio. 

Adjoining the palace was the ruined Holyrood Chapel, with the 
afternoon sun shining through its casements and making such a pic- 
ture that we went outside to the hansom for our camera. In the midst 
of taking the picture we were apprehended by a guard who threat- 
ened to have us confined in the castle. It was an opportunity to try a 
Scot's sense of humor and one by which we profited so that now we 

28 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

are able to add our testimony cumulatively to the world's and state 
that a Scotchman, not excepting a Scotch policeman, has no sense of 
humor. 

We got the picture, however, though the focus seems to have been 
a little disturbed with the arrest. 

In driving away it was with a new appreciative sense that we 
passed beside the ring and cross in a street known as the Sanctuary, 
where, in the old days, the malefactor might flee and be free from ar- 
rest. 

After dinner came our first experience in a Scottish theater. We 
went to the "Empire" a "high-class variety" theater. We paid 3s 
for seats in the stalls and sat and talked with several very delightful 
citizens of Edinburgh. Our only recollection of the performance is a 
song which threw an intimate sidelight on a phase of Cockney life, 
sung by Miss Rachel Lowe and called, "They All Go To Church on 
Sunday." The song was descriptive of certain social amenities inci- 
dent to Saturday night, but each verse wound up with the assurance 
that "They all go to church on Sunday." 



29 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 



CHAPTER VIII. 
London. 

Brown and Miller, Sr., by this time were at Leicester as the 
guests of Mr. Wm. Sculthorpe, and they telegraphed to Edinburgh in- 
structing Miller, Jr., and the Judge to stop off at West Leigh and 
obtain some idea of British home life. But this was not what they 
came out to see and at Edinburgh they took the night express for 
London. 

As some one has put it, "London is something of a proposition." 
How to state this proposition in terms the most readily to convey its 
impression upon us, is a difficult matter. The melancholy village 
statistician, would, we know, shake his head in a sad, comprehending 
way if we were to state that in proportion to its population London 
produced more lunatics than any other city in the world. He might 
be equally affected to dubious sorrow were we to assert the fact that 
in London there is a birth and a death every moment of the day. 

Description by the statement that London's area is ten miles 
square, and its population over five millions, is equally inadequate 
and would please only the lover of the abstract. No ; these terms will 
not do. 

For us, London is expressed as the location of Westminster 
Abbey, the Tower, the Strand, the Inns of Court and the Capitol of 
the English world. London is a magic city for us by day and by night. 
It is the only "old world" with which we are familiar. We know 
its streets from Dickens and its parks from Barrie. We have known 
its principal buildings and houses all our lives. Its great men have 
been known to us almost intimately. It is familiar in its every phase 
— in sunshine and in fog, en fete and turbulent with riots. We know 
the coster and the bobby — and the bus and the coach. 

We know the whole city and when we arrived at 8 a. m. on the 
morning of July 11, we went about it with easy familiarity. After 
installing ourselves at the Cecil, we took a bus on the Strand for Lud- 
gate Circus with the idea of getting home letters. 

Of course, there were no home letters and nothing disappointed 
we sallied forth to Hanover Square to interview a tailor. 

There is a great satisfaction in going to a London tailor — a satis- 
faction one never takes away with him ; but it is really one of the first 

30 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

things to do on your first trip to London, a thing not necessary to re- 
peat, but a thing of which the going without creates a queer sense of 
an indefinable void — or so we felt, and therefore we went to Hanover 
Square and squandered 7-10 on a rain coat. 

From the tailor's we hastened to London Tower, though we were 
conscious of a feeling that the proper course of conduct would be to 
loiter through Hyde Park, and then saunter down Pall Mall to a 
club. 

At the Tower we gave ourselves over to an examination of the 
crown jewels and the collection of arms and armour in conformity 
with the example of the many visitors apparently bent, as we were, 
in seeing as much as possible in the shortest possible time. 

It was not until Traitor's Gate was passed and we had come upon 
the carved mementoes of injustice and unhappiness left upon the stone 
walls by the prisoners of Beauchamp Tower, that we began to catch a 
little of the light which the tower and its contents throw upon the indi- 
vidual price paid to make England great. 

And then suddenly it was all with us and we went back again 
to the White Tower and there they all were in their customary atti- 
tudes. Henry VIII and Richard Coeur de Lion with their pages and 
outriders, Richard the Third and Richard, Duke of York. We could 
hear the ancient tramp and the clank of the chains and armor. The 
lights from the bright battle axes played again upon the plumes of 
Sir Knight, the jousting spear rested again upon the stirrup of the 
tournament saddle, and, with my lady's colors upon his shield, Sir 
Launcelot rode once again in the lists. 

As if from the wand of some conjurer whole time-worn spectacles 
present themselves one after another. Old voices long since dead are 
heard, some grave and austere, some gay and joyful, some tender and 
sad, for here imprisoned in chain of mail and buried behind iron visor 
or concealed behind an old shield, still and silent and fixed forever, are 
old intrigues and disputes, old hopes and ambitions, old loves and 
hates. All the old human motives, the causes and hidden springs of 
England's history, still now forever, but in their very silence speaking 
to the living age in reminders seldom heard of the eternal vanity of 

it all. 

How easy it is to go down the road to yesterday until we are back 
with the people of halberd and lance— back in old "merrie" England 
— and how readily we understand it all. 

"Thej change their skies above them, 
But not their hearts that roam. 
We learned from our wistful mothers 
To call old England 'home.' " 

31 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

We became impregnated with the "atmosphere" of England in 
the Tower and it remained with us, through all our yaried experiences 
in London, dim at times, at others just vaguely impressionistic ; but 
never intense again until we were beneath the roof of Westminster 
Abbey, and though we went direct from the Tower to St. Paul's we 
had lost much of the atmosphere. It trailed behind us as we went 
along the meaner buildings beside the Thames and some of it was lost 
about the corners of the buildings near the Bank of England (those 
about Lombard street), swallowed up, perhaps in the atmosphere of 
the modern commercial activity of present day London. But when 
we had lunched at the Cheshire Cheese, in fanciful company with old 
Johnson, we knew that enough of the "atmosphere" had been saved 
to color our entire stay, and we even had the temerity to spend the 
afternoon at an English Turkish bath in order to reduce somewhat of 
the stiffness left by our record-breaking feat at Ben Lomond. 

On returning to the hotel we found Brown and Miller back from 
their excursion in Leicester and loud in their praises of Sculthorpe, 
and, so glad was the Judge to see them that he instantly determined 
upon carrying out a plan long harbored in his breast. He would give 
a dinner at the Savoy. Brown and the Millers would be there and 
there would be also one or two creatures of his fancy, witty, vivacious 
and fair, charming and companionable persons, eager and sympathetic, 
attuned to every mood and fitting in complete harmony with the soft 
lights and low music, the bright faces and table flowers of the Savoy. 
Creatures wholly ideal, but appreciative, even more than the real 
guests, of the strained green turtle, and the caneton a la presse, and 
the clos de Voegot. 

It was to be a dinner! Had he not planned it so and had it not 
been so written in his dreams ever since he had come upon "Le Lettre 
d 'Amour. ' ' 

But alas ! for the trivial and inconsequential ; with what frequency 
does it not mar human enjoyment. What a little thing will set our 
schemes awry and put a dull negative to our bright, assertive hopes. 
The Savoy had a rule requiring dress suits in its dining room, 
and Miller had no dress suit— only a long-tailed, low-cut simulacrum 
of a dress suit— too palpably unreal to escape the lynx-eyed and 
inexorable head waiter who excluded him from the room, and though 
the dinner was ordered and the Judge and Brown sat down, how 
melancholy the whole affair became, no creatures of fancy, no charm- 
ing persons, witty and fair— nothing but a dull ache attuned to the 
music which seemed to sing 

32 



PIIILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

' ' 'Twas ever thus from childhood 's hour 
I've seen my fondest hopes decay." 

"The band was playing somewhere and somewhere hearts were 
light, somewhere men were laughing and children were at play," but 
that first night of the Philadelphia party in London closed upon a 
heavy-hearted and dispirited misanthrope, whose mind was sombre 
and subdued. 



33 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 



CHAPTER IX. 
The Abbey. 

"Erewhile the age was darksome and had something left in it of 
the infelicity and calamity of the Goths" but today we went to West- 
minster Abbey and the absurdity of last night's dinner is forgotten in 
the profundity of the abbey. 

It is a task of too serious a hue for this inept and inexperienced 
pen, unused as it is to any sustained dignity of expression (being 
rather the creature of the inconsequential ) , to attempt to describe the 
epitome of English history, Westminster Abbey. 

If Carlyle is right in his postulate, that history is the record of the 
lives of men, and we believe he is, then we were justified in feeling 
that almost all of England, all of old England, at least, was concen- 
trated in and compressed within the walls of Westminster Abbey. 

In the aisles and transepts, what an array of names of great citi- 
zens — citizens whose history is the history of England. 

Here is the monument of William Pitt over the spot where he 
was laid, surrounded by the monuments of others scarcely less worthy ; 
opposite lies Palmerston removed by the width of the Abbey almost 
f r om his contemporary Cobden, who died in the same year as his 
master. 

Further on, all of eloquence seems to be buried beneath the name, 
Henry Grattan, until we see just beyond the names of Charles Fox 
and the younger Pitt, close together, rivals in death, almost, each 
claiming an equal share of attention. 

What school-boy spirit of emulation will not awaken in one's 
breast at such a solemn roll-call of worthies. There they lie, in honor 
— the greatest England can afford. Fixed they are, as much as any- 
thing human can be fixed in the world 's history. They left their im- 
print upon their time and the world is better for their having lived. 
And here they lie, stationary, as it were, in the flux of time, to engage 
the awe and reverence of every son of the Anglo-Saxon people. 

Yes, the rivalry for greatness still continues beyond death. The 
master in politics and in the forum is here again challenged by the 
master in science and in literature. Beside Wilberforce lies Charles 
Darwin and Herschel, while old competitors in literature lie among 
those whom they called masters and those by whom they were once 

34 



PHILADELPH] A X S A B RO A I) 

regarded as masters: Addison, Gray and Goldsmith; Macaulay and 
Thackeray; Burns and Southey and Coleridge and a host of others— a 
small host but magnificently great. 

And a grateful sense of brotherhood is engendered when we come 
across Longfellow's name set up beside England's honored ones and 
we are almost moved to write a letter to the Home Secretary or send 
.hi open letter to the British public, through the Times, so needful is 
it to express our appreciation, but we do none of these things, we 
only vibrated more finely and received impressions whose very in- 
tensity makes for difficulty of description. 

The Abbey to us is a great epic, the greatest of any. It repre- 
sents the highest point of what Europe means and always did moan to 
us — the temple of all that is fascinating in this most fascinating world. 
It left us with a "sense of names in the air, of ghosts a1 the windows, 
of signs and tokens," a whole world of the past with all its old loves 
and hates and joys and sorrows thick in the very air. so thick that it 
all came out with us into the sunshine of a July day and stayed with us 
until Paris made of it a palimpsest. 



35 



I'll I LA 1) K L r II I A NS A BROAD 



CHAPTER X. 

The Inns op Court. 

Across the street from the abbey at the Lombardo, Miller took the 
party for lunch. Miller was still in a restless mood and it was difficult 
for him to compose himself to the business of eating. With so much 
to see, how could a man be expected to wait for the butter, and what 
stupidity made the waiter always forget ice water, and, anyhow, what 
oriental indolence had given birth to the table d 'hote ? At every meal 
we were prepared to see the poor, unfortunate scaleret who humbly 
took our order, but slowly filled it, taken out to the nearest lamppost 
and hanged by Miller. What small explosions suddenly took place 
over the soup ? As the meal progressed affairs were in a ferment and 
toward the end of the meal there was always an ebullition of Miller. 
What extraordinary imbecility was evidenced by the mixture of the 
orders of the meats and what trembling wretches the waiters were 
when Miller rose to speak. 

And so it was on this day at the Lombardo. A day of lights and 
shadows, of things pleasant and otherwise, for we went shopping in 
the afternoon and Brown purchased a rain-coat at the Judge 's expense 
— said rain-coat having been won on a wager with the ill-starred 
Judge, who was inconsolable until he found himself in the Army and 
Navy stores purchasing silk stockings for the Pikerina. It was a mat- 
ter of pride with him that there was some one for whom he might pur- 
chase such things and emboldened by the success with which he pur- 
chased them, he went secretly back the next day to make a similar pur- 
chase. 

The Inns of Court were reserved for the next day, for Miller had 
decreed that a whole day should be given over to their inspection. 
He had a card to an English solicitor and he conducted the party over 
to the solicitor's, who turned us over to a young gentleman greatly re- 
sembling the immortal Guppy. 

With Guppy preceding us, we went leisurely through Grey's 
Inn, Lincoln 's Inn Fields, the Inner Temple, Staple Inn ; and, in fact, 
inspected every lane and alley and building belonging to the benchers, 
as the governors of these corporations are called. 

At 2 Brick Court, Middle Temple Lane, where Goldsmith lived 
and died, we saw the rooms in which Blackstone completed his cele- 

36 



PIIILADELI'II I A \S A B B <> A I) 

brated commentaries. And when we crossed the street and entered 
the Royal Courts of Justice, "Guppy" pointed out to us young 
Dickens, the son of Charles Dickens, now a barrister and practicing 

the profession his father so much despised. 

In the Royal Court Building the Lord Chancellor was sitting in 
great pomp, the exchequer guard or maces standing on each Bide of 
him — he, in his official robes, and the barristers in their gowns and 
wigs, making a picture very dignified and impressive, not at all like 
the picture Dickens drew of that foggy afternoon which opens Bleak 
House. 

The High Court of Admiralty was equally impressive. The ad- 
miralty judge sat with two retired admirals, in uniform, one on each 
side ; above the three was a gilded anchor ; before them was a model of 
a steamer, and they were listening to an argument concerning a col- 
lision in the Thames between a Dutch ship and a Norwegian hark. 

It was all as it should be even to the oral opinion rendered in the 
Court of Appeals by Sir Richard Harvey-Cozens. And when we were 
out in the street again and had turned down Chancery Lane toward 
where Cursitor street is (or was), we almost expected to come across 
Snagsby "greasy, warm, herbacious and chewing," or to come upon 
Mr. Vholes' office "in disposition retiring and in situation retired." 

But there was only the busy street with its strings of hansoms 
and its interminable line of buses, one of which we took to the Vic- 
toria to partake of Miller's abomination, the table d'hote. 



37 



PJIILADELPHIANS ABROAD 



CHAPTER XL 

London by Night. 

In the afternoon Miller and the West Pointer started off together 
to see Warwick and Kenilworth leaving Brown and the Judge to dine 
together at the Criterion and afterward to go to Leicester Square to 
attend the vaudeville at the Empire — a night to be marked with a 
white stone. 

A night, too — when we had a glimpse, as we had most every night, 
of the night side of London. "The show, as the man from Up There 
terms it, is seen at its best — that is, its worst — on a still, warm, starry 
night in the beginning of July, when the London season is at its 
height." You go along the pavement between Piccadilly and Regent 
street. You hear ' ' the scented rustle of the prowling face ' ' — and are 
subjected every now and then to the quick, searching glance of the 
keen eye, as the picture hat and the "gorgeous" gown sails by, alone 
on the pavement, or successfully in a hansom attended by a man. 
But they are not all "wandering wisps of painted humanity that dye 
the London night with rouge" as Mr. Hichens put it, for when the 
many theaters deposit their patrons on the streets, the bedizened give 
place to the real pleasure seekers, hurrying, laughingly and good- 
humoredly along the crowded thoroughfare or jammed in the traffic 
seated in handsom and cab with just a hint here and there of luxurious 
cloak and charming, rounded shoulder — just hint enough to stir an old 
sense of loneliness in a bachelor breast, a fit accompaniment for the 
deserted air which the abandoned streets soon put on. 

Deserted by all, save the straggler and the policeman, exchang- 
ing experiences such as Machray describes: "One of them has just 
had an adventure with a refractory individual, ' 'E didn't know wot 
'e wanted — didn't nohow — 'cept he wanted a row — 'e was jus' spoilin' 
fur a fight — 'e didn't mind 'oo it was with, or wot it wur fur — 'e jes' 
wanted trouble — 'e wus out lookin' fur it, 'e was, 'e warn't goin' to 
move on, not 'e, wy should 'e ? An ' 'e gyve me some more o ' 'is lip. 
But I moved 'im on ! ' " 

After a night spent in the vicinity of Picadilly Circus under the 
shadow of the cupid upon the fountain nothing affords such charm as 
the country and the lives of those who live in the great outdoors. The 
freshness and cleanness and simplicity all aid in erasing unpleasant 

38 



PHILADELP1IIANS ABROAD 

memories and restoring the proper tone to one's mind, and so the next 
day when we ran into Bright and his wife and they proposed a run in 
their machine out to the Kingston races, we hailed the prospect with 
joy. 

Out through James and Hyde Parks and Kensington Gardens, 
past Buckingham Palace, through innumerable streets with little, low 
walls in front of little, low houses set back from the road; along old 
Brompton road and Fulham road, the very names evocative of Dickens 
and every sort of character in certain English fiction and history, then 
over the Putney bridge to Richmond, and then tea upon the terrace of 
the Star and Garter. Then on through Richmond park, past the boys 
playing cricket on Wimbledon Common to Kingston. 

Just above Kingston, on the Thames, Bright took us to an English 
Country Club, an old, rambling, quaint, country house finished in 
hard wood and furnished in attractive furniture. The interior cool 
and inviting, the whole effect soothing in an indescribable way. It 
might be the effect of the old pictures, which we were pleased to con- 
sider the best of their kind, it might be the respectful and solicitous 
servants, whatever it was, to us Bright 's "Country Club " seemed the 
most attractive we had ever been in, and when we had walked down 
the lawn and seated ourselves at an outside table before a pot of tea 
and a plate of crackers, with the Thames flowing away at our feet, we 
had our first temptation toward expatriation. 

It was only to see the boat races that we could be persuaded to 
leave at all, and when we finally did so it was with a firm resolve 
some time to come back and dream "as of old by the river. ' ' 

The races gave something of the same delightful impression as the 
Country Club. We can never be too grateful to Bright for letting us 
see them both. He ran his machine along the tow path, and before 
the races we saw how the Englishman enjoys his rivers. 

We had seen something of the way the English enjoy outdoor life 
at Chester when we rowed up the River Dee, but here we saw metro- 
politan life spending its afternoons in the country attired in bright 
blazers with jaunty cap, and with hamper nearby, seated in every sort 
of attractive water craft, drawn up along the banks of the river, wait- 
ing for the start of the race. There was the house boat with bright, 
growing flowers all along its edges, and bright awnings over its decks 
and over the lively chattering groups seated thereon; there was the 
punt in great numbers and here and there a fair Jane was spreading 
a napkin across a seat for tea and bread and jelly with an attractive 
and enviable person in flannel coat smoking a pipe lazily astern ; there 

39 



PHILADELPIIIANS ABROAD 

was the active working boat with two or three occupants impatiently 
feeling its way along the outer edge of the waiting boats. 

There they all were making the prettiest picture of river life we 
have ever seen, ami when the race started and the whole scene became 
animated and alive with waving flags and caps, and Bright sent his 
machine along the path, keeping pace with the racing shells, and we 
were surrounded by running, shouting, cap-waving English sportsmen, 
we put another day down as marked with a white stone. 

We came back through Bushy Park, with its deer and its avenues 
of horse-chestnuts, through Twickenham into London to find waiting 
for us our first actual contact with the feminine English. Mrs. Scul- 
thorpe, the recent hostess of Brown and Miller, with Miss Boulter, a 
real English girl, were in London and Miller had arranged a dinner 
in their honor at the hotel. 

Miller and his son were just back from Warwick and Kenil worth 
and we were all tired but happy so the evening was spent in lounging 
about the hotel, listening to the opera for a while by means of the 
phonograph arrangement in the writing room of the Cecil and talking 
of the sights we had seen and planning fresh sights on the morrow 
when we were all to go to Hampton Court. 

Young Miller and the Judge were considerably puffed up because 
they had come upon Mr. William Jennings Bryan in a talkative mood 
and he had discussed with Miller, Jr., the virtues of West Point and 
its superiority over any similar school in the eastern hemisphere. 

Bryan was the lion of the hour. He was just back from an ex- 
tensive trip in the East and had made a very clever speech at a Fourth 
of July dinner but recently given at the hotel, and on the whole was 
the most considerable American in London. He divided honors with 
an Oriental potentate of unpronounceable cognomen, who infested the 
hotel with a whole retinue of turbaned servants and himself appeared 
daily in most gorgeous zouave-like trousers and silk turbans of the 
most intricate folds. 

These guests of the hotel lent such color to the court yard that 
Brown used to declare himself daily as desirous of sitting about the 
entrance and becoming one of a group of indolent ones who asserted 
that more of London and cosmopolitanism could be seen at the entrance 
to the Cecil than anywhere else. There were arguments in favor of 
the plan, too, for the scene was lively enough, and every moment al- 
most, a cab would drive up and deposit the most interesting-looking 



40 



PII I I, A I) E I, I' II I A N S A B R OAD 

people with the most interesting-looking, label-pasted Luggage, and one 
could fall into the most pleasing speculations as to who the people 
were and what sort of an influence tiny tnighl have upon one's life, 
presuming one knew them, and musing thus build fanciful and pleas- 
ing little romances, all unconscious of the irony in the unacknowledged 
actual sometimes evidenced in ;i wrangle with Cabbv over tie- fare. 



41 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 



CHAPTER XII. 

Hampton Court. 

But we preferred this sort of romancing in action or upon scenes 
not calculated to put a negation upon our dreams and so we exchanged 
the possibilities of the hotel for other places offering equal allurments, 
and this we did the next day particularly, although it threatened rain 
and although a ride on the top of a tally-ho to Hampton Court was 
none too reassuring. Notwithstanding, however, after we had at- 
tended church in both St. Paul's and the Abbey, we climbed upon a 
tally-ho at Trafalgar Square and were off to Hampton Court, the 
monument to Wolsley of monumental folly. 

The Greuzes and Tintorettos and Van Dykes and the numerous 
other pictures to be seen at Hampton Court do not suffer description. 
We recall Mantegna's "Triumphal Procession of Csesar" as the gem 
of the collection, a fact gleaned from Baedaker ; and we discovered an 
interest in the Italian and Venetian school, the forerunner of a wider 
and deeper interest in painting — an interest to be fostered and 
strengthened by a visit to the National Gallery the next day and one 
to be forever fixed by the Louvre and its Venus di Milo. 

Of course we saw the grape vine at Hampton Court and wandered 
about the shady avenues — at least Miss Boulton did in company with 
the Judge, although she basely deserted him on the approach of an 
officer and while he was surreptitiously taking a picture of the Queen 's 
Walk, thus causing what threatened to be almost an international com- 
plication. 

But the party managed to get away entire from Hampton Court 
and returned to London (after lunching at the Mitre Hotel), via an 
electric bus and the tube. 

On our return Miss Boulton and Mrs. Sculthrope decamped to 
Leicester, and so crestfallen was the party that it was decided to 
abandon England the next day. 

Brown was for going to Ostend and Monte Carlo. He was dis- 
covering a proclivity for the froth of life hitherto unsuspected. Miller 
was determined to go up the Rhine; he felt the call of the blood and 
prated much of his German ancestry. The Judge was set upon a 
tour through the galleries of Dresden, Florence and Rome. Anarchy 

42 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

reigned supreme. It took considerable forbearance and a vast amount 
of diplomacy to prevent the little party from disintegrating and going 
several ways, but it was finally determined to go up the Rhine and 
then into Switzerland, and so on Tuesday, the 17th of July, the whole 
party assembled at Charing Cross Station and took the 9 o'clock train 
for Dover. 



43 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 



CHAPTER XIII. 
Off to the Continent. 

Soon we were upon the Calais packet and the chalk cliffs of old 
England were receding from view. The activity incident to the change 
put everyone in good spirits, the channel was in good mood and the 
passage was not attended with the usual unpleasant features. The 
Judge went about explaining his familiarity with the French tongue 
and the ease with which the difficulties of intercourse on the conti- 
nent would be overcome. The West Pointer went off behind a pile 
of trunks to glean a few German phrases from a pocket collection of 
them bought in a Strand shop, while the elder Miller expressed an 
abiding belief that the language, as a sort of tribute to heritage, would 
spring full flowered to his lips and he would put us all to the blush 
as uncultured and untaught. 

Without actual contact with a foreign tongue and alien ears it 
is surprising what confidence the possession of the single word "com- 
bien" or the singular words "sprechen Sie Deutsch" will give one. 

Disembarkation at Calais will dispel all such illusions. When 
a hundred jabbering, incomprehensible and uncomprehending French 
porters rush at one, the only expressions surging through a distracted 
mind are English, and when one's intention is to parlez Francais, 
and those to whom you have boasted of efficiency crowd about ex- 
pectant and the porter happens to be without even a modicum of con- 
sideration or tact, the situation is painful, indeed. Of course, Brown 
stepped in and managed to make himself understood without difficulty, 
but the situation was embarrassing to the Judge. 

The all-day ride to Cologne was full of incident, though the day 
was oppressively warm and the compartment in which the party found 
themselves, stuffy. But every now and then a stranger would find 
his or her way into the compartment and remain an object of almost 
passionate interest until his or her station would be reached and he 
or she would depart. Once while we were riding through Belgium 
a simon-pure "foreigner" entered the apartment and, producing a 
cigar, began to smoke. Now, plainly written upon the division of 
the window was a notice not to smoke, in both French and German, 
and Miller, whose temper had suffered in sympathy with his avoirdu- 
pois from the extreme heat, began in too audible English and in 

44 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

remarks ' 'frequent and painful and free" to comment to the West 
Pointer on the smoking and on the necessity of calling a guard at 
the next station in order to reprimand the intruder. 

Presently the offender, addressing a coat rack above him in the 
most choice English, explained to the coat rack that the rule against 
smoking did not obtain in Belgium. 

Once the present scribe forgot a set speech in a college debate 
and for a full minute studied the agonized and anxious countenances 
of a sympathetic audience; and once he stepped into a hole in the 
dark, but never has he experienced a moment so tense and painful 
as the one just succeeding this stranger's address to the coat rack. 

Old diplomatic Brown broke the spell and soon we were all talk- 
ing to the stranger. The Judge, taking time to arrange his thoughts, 
tried a little French, not altogether to his chagrin, and the stranger 
was discovered to be a French envoy on a mission to Holland. 

Not so happy was the experience at Metz. Here the train was 
boarded by custom inspectors and by a conductor demanding the tick- 
ets for the trip from Calais. Now, just before, the Judge had arranged 
to have the guide sally forth at Metz and buy the tickets for the 
balance of the journey and the guide had not yet returned with the 
"billets." Besides, the tickets during the trip from Calais had not 
been gathered up in the regular American way and they now reposed 
forgotten in the pocket of the Judge. The demand for tickets by 
the conductor, though made in French, was obviously vehement. The 
answer of the Judge, though made in equally good French, was not 
satisfying. The conductor was insistent and his needs apparently 
exigent. Finally both the conductor and the Judge exploded — the 
conductor apparently indulging in some form of French Billingsgate 
apd the Judge proclaiming in English a desire to terminate the dis- 
cussion. Meanwhile Miller, all excitement, was legally defining the 
offense of riding on a continental train without a ticket and imploring 
the Judge to assume a more pacific attitude. The moment was charged 
with dire potentiality, but with a parting remark apparently designed 
by the conductor as a scathing one, he drew himself off, and the party 
proceeded on their way with the tickets innocently and unsuspect- 
edly reposing in the Judge's pocket. 

On the whole the trip was unpicturesque enough and little of 
interest could be seen from the car window save the row after row of 
tall, Normandy poplars silhouetted against a clear, foreign sky. But 
we were glad enough when the poplars were succeeded by buildings 
and when the spire of the cathedral of Cologne announced our desti- 
nation, and we were all comfortably established in the Hotel du Nord. 

45 



1*11 I L A D E L P II I A N S ABROAD 



CHAPTER XIV. 
The Rhine. 

After the warm and very dusty ride of the day before, perhaps 
he breakfast out in the court yard of the du Nord was more appre- 
iated than it would be without such a precursor; however that may 
>e, the bright, cool morning, the splashing fountain set up in a flower 
»ed bright with colors and fresh with a clean green freshness, made 
>f this breakfast the best continental breakfast we have ever had. 

We were all attuned for the visit to the cathedral and the trip 
ubsequently up the Rhine 

The famous cathedral was the first one we had seen on the trip. 
Ve did not wait to see the custodian and have him exhibit to us the 
ilver case with its bones of the three Wise Men of the East, for a 
uneral was in progress and services were being conducted, but we 
pent some time outside in admiration of this, the most perfect speci- 
len of Gothic architecture, the while Miller expatiated on architec- 
ure of every sort. The gargoyles especially engaged our attention 
nd we would gladly have remained longer in Cologne to allow the 
eauty of this wonderful church to grow upon us, but the day was 
ierfect and the trip up the Rhine was not to be lightly set aside, and 
re soon found ourselves on board the Rhine steamer making our way 
gainst the strong current past the bridge of boats, with the city of 
Cologne sinking from view and the cathedral rising more and more 
passive and grand as the boat took us farther away. 

And now vineyards began to replace cities and soon all the beauty 
f the Rhine was upon us. 

"The wide and winding Rhine, 

Whose breast of waters broadly swells 
Between the banks which bear the vine 

And hills all rich with blossomed trees, 
And fields which promise corn and wine, 

And scattered cities crowning these, 
Whose fair white walls along them shine." 

Until the steamer passes Bonn, noted for its university, the most 
eautiful portion of the Rhine, that between Bonn and Coblentz, has 
ot been reached. The banks "which bear the vine" are too far 
way, for the steamer keeps in mid-channel and Byron's "peasant 

46 



IMIILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

girls, with deep blue eyes," who "walk smiling o'er this paradise," 
can be best seen through the medium of a Tauchnitz edition, aided 
by a well-trained imagination. Miller kept sweeping the banks with 
field glasses when he was not engaged in an effort to focus his camera, 
and Miller did not report any blue-eyed peasant girls— a circumstance 
arguing strongly for their absence. 

While Miller dashed fore and aft and across the 'midships trying 
to place his camera to catch a crumbling old feudal castle, or an 
effect of light and shadow upon a beautiful hillside, Brown struck up 
an acquaintance with Scott of Chicago. Scott was to be Aladdin's 
lamp, making possible the best golf story Brown and the Judge were 
t0 have— their old story of "What's the little ball for?" had long 
since been threadbare, worn to a shadow and gone limping into bore- 
dom with Nutty 's famous quotation from the "Pink 'un"— "Hardy 
men these golfers!" 

But just now Scott gave no promise of future service. He and 
Brown were deep in a discussion of the gas and water problems of 
big municipalities, and Scott, who had been touring the Orient for 
more than a year, listened while Brown settled the political history 
of the United States ten years in advance. It was the first willing 
ear Brown had encountered since he left the long-suffering Eckersley 
behind in Philadelphia, and Scott was only saved from a mental 
plethora of politics by the arrival of the dinner hour. 

The dinner, served on deck beneath a flapping awning, with the 
vine-clad hills of the Rhine sweeping along, and here and there an 
old ruin, picturesque in light and shadow, needed little to mark it 
from all other dinners, but that little was supplied in the form of 
a bottle of Neirsteiner, our first in Germany, but not our last. 

Meanwhile we were approaching the "Castled Crag of Drachen- 
fels," with its charming legend of Siegfried and the Dragon and its 
stirring tales of the Robber Barons. How readily old German tales 
of deeds of daring and supernatural happenings were recalled in this 
enchanted neighborhood. Here upon the island, just grazed by the 
steamer in passing, is the old nunnery where the bride of Charle- 
magne's nephew took the veil, being falsely led to believe in his death, 
while just above it on the bank is Rolandseck, where dwelt the mourn- 
ful husband and where he spent his days in melancholy contem- 
plation of his young bride's living tomb. All about are the cele- 
brated "Seven Mountains," the whole making the best picture of 
the day— and being in shadow, nearly breaking Miller's heart, for by 

47 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

;his time a view was nothing unless it could be subjected to the cam- 
era s lens, and scenery had become merely an object for a correct focus. 

In early school days when regular exercises were suspended and 
;he day given over to the exploitation of the histrionic and forensic 
ability of the scholars — when some illy-favored, thin and ungainly 
female child, with her bad points enhanced by the confusion incident 
:o facing her classmates from the teacher's platform, would break 
forth in a nasal whine and feebly, reluctantly and doubtfully dis- 
charge herself of the assertion that "curfew shall not ring tonight," 
ve can remember a scoffing and sneaking doubt steal over our sceptic 
consciousness; but when a red-headed, freckle-nosed little Irishman 
(vould gravely deliver himself of the palpably absurd statement, "For 
[ was born at Bingen, fair Bingen on the Rhine," we were carried 
i way in sympathy with the thought, and our fancy gave us an equally 
lustere origin, and so it is that always Bingen has been to us the 
jrightest birth spot on God's footstool anywhere. 

And here we were at Bingen, actually moored fast to its wharf. 
[t was too much to believe. 

It was possible we might find the sword where "with boyish love 
ie hung it where the sunlight used to shine on the vine-clad walls at 
Bingen." But it was just possible, too, that Bingen might not be 
;he Bingen of our dreams, and so we resolutely turned our backs and 
contemplated the other shore until the steamer had cast off and pro- 
ceeded on up the river toward Mayence. 

It was nine in the evening when we stepped off the steamer at 
Mayence into the noisiest, most insistent and best-humored crowd of 
cabbies we have met. 

We were mentally indulging in Byron's farewell: 

"Adieu to thee, fair Rhine! How long delighted 
The stranger fain would linger on his way! 

Thine is a scene alike where souls united 

Or lonely Contemplation thus might stray. ' ' 

But the babble of the cabbies was too much and we resigned our- 
selves to the less poetic but more necessary task of bundling ourselves 
and luggage into a lumbering cab, bound for the railway station, for 
we were going to take a sleeper to Luzerne. 

This ride was the most enchanting foreign ride we have had. We 
remember once in America riding on a frosty night under a full moon 
with Mr. and Mrs. Gumbes. It was a three-mile drive in a station 
wagon, and we have given that ride first place for unalloyed charm — 
the charm of the moonlight and the cool, crisp air, the noise of the 

48 



1 ' I L I L A D E L P H I A N S ABROAD 

quick hoofs on the frozen ground, the contrast to a city scene lately 
left, and finally the charm of companionship, but the ride in Mayence 
had all the charm of novelty, the very pavements were new, the inces- 
sant crack of the driver's long whip was altogether new, the driver 
and his carriage — mysterious and strange in their novelty — and then 
the city but imperfectly lighted so that spires and steeples and build- 
ings massed and changed before the eye like a city of dreams, the 
turn of each corner presented the possibilities of odd and mysterious 
adventures and the lack of knowledge of direction made the drive 
the one supreme adventure of the trip — this huge, incomprehensible 
German might take us anywhere — and this possibility made us tingle 
with expectation, and finally came the hope that the drive would end 
in something more romantic than an old, prosaic railway station. 

And end in something romantic it almost did. Its end almost 
approached the fantastic, and if fictitious can in any sense be said 
to be a synonym for romantic, then our end was romantic, for it ended 
in something fictitious. 

It all came about through Miller's lamentable ignorance of the 
tongue of his forefathers — his impatient insistence upon the use of 
the English language and his absurd annoyance because a German 
ticket-seller indulged in the innocent custom of giving false change. 

Had we not been given to understand that the interminable and 
intricate polysyllables of the German language were commonplaces 
with which Miller had spent his youth in intimate companionship ; 
had we not assumed that Miller would show the same good humor 
toward the ticket-seller's peccadillos as a good American was wont 
to show toward the humorous badinage of a highwayman of Dead 
Man's Gulch; had we not imbibed confidence from the West Pointer's 
surreptitious communications with his German phrase-book; in short, 
if we had not been basely deceived by the Millers we could have 
escaped the grand torture of Mayence and the fictitious (or had we 
agreed it was "romantic) ending to our ride. 

But we were not undeceived until Miller, all excitement, vehe- 
mence and vituperation had engaged every railway station attendant 
in a contest for the vituperative palm, the while the last train for 
Luzerne pulled away from the station leaving us tired and angry to 
whatever solace could be procured by Miller's alien tongue. 

The solace forthcoming was of a kind to make us forever sym- 
pathize with the person who stated a preference for living in a state 
of alarm. We exchanged the excitement of the railway station for 
the tomb-like silence of the Hotel National, for thither had we been 

49 



r II I I, A J) EL P II I A NS ABROAD 

ured by Miller. He said it was cheap. II was cheap so much so 
is to suggest the word fictitious. To designate the house as a hotel 
vas to be at leasl facetious. The price we paid was two francs, in 
jondon we would have Ween asked half ;i shilling and in America 
me dime would have commanded equal comforts. Brown and the 
ludge broke oul in lament al ion, the younger Miller curled a scornful 

ip, but all were afraid to venture ou1 in search of better quarters 
srithout Miller — and Miller, lil<c a human canary, said nothing, but 
:ep1 repeal ing, ( Iheap ! ( Iheap ! 

Is it weakness of intellect, Miller, we cried, 
Or has something gone wrong in your bulky inside? 
Willi ;i I wist of liis Gorman pnekod lio.-ul, lie replied, 
Cheapl < Ihea pi Cheap! 

Let no record he made of the night this is not a blistering, scath- 
ng, scorching, denunciatory pen. We have forgiven Miller and we 
tope that time will erase in part the memory of the Hotel National. 



50 



PIIILADELPHIANS ABROAD 



CHAPTER XV. 

Switzerland. 

The next morning at five o'clock Brown and the Judge were 
about and at six were en route for Luzerne. A happy chance put 
Mrs. Marshall and Miss Reeba Marshall and Miss Schattel, all of New- 
ark, in the same compartment. It was a happy chance because Miss 
Schattel spoke German fluently and managed the luncheon at Zurich 
with enviable ease. 

Instead of going with Brown and the Judge to Luzerne, Miller 
and his son delayed the trip to Switzerland in order to go to Heidel- 
berg, and in so doing missed the Grand Duke Michael and forever 
lost the opportunity of being characters in the great golf story. 

It was four o'clock in the afternoon when Brown and the Judge, 
taking the first hotel to hand, deposited themselves and luggage at 
the St. Gotthard Terminus Hotel; later they found their way to the 
Schweizerhof in time for the effect of the sunset upon the Rigi and 
Pilatus, but not before a visit to the Glacier Gardens and the Lion of 
Luzerne, the tribute to the Swiss guards, and, excluding Napoleon's 
tomb, the most impressive object of the trip. 

"And History, with all her volumes vast, 
Hath but one page — 'tis better written here, 
Away with words! draw near." 

To speak of the Alps without extravagance were a difficult task. 
The word most often recurring to the mind is that word but seldom 
applied to things terrestial, the word "eternal." 

One wanders at night along the lake, beneath the clear, starry 
sky, with the mountains rising like the walls of some magnificent tem- 
ple on either side and keeps repeating the word ' ' eternal. ' ' At times 
the sublimity of it all is upon one, but always is present the one 
thought — the never-changing, cold, solitary, eternal air of it all. 

As Byron says, "High mountains are a feeling," and to be 
among the mountains and yet at the side of a lake is to raise that 
feeling to its highest possible exponent. The still, clear lake mirrors 
the stars and floating white clouds in its blue surface ; the silent trees, 
reflected in the water along the shore, give a sense of companionship 
and repose, and the cooling breath of a stray breeze stirs up a sense 

51 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

)f the infinite almost too poignant to be pleasant, and yet all too 
leeting, leaving a sense of having stood on "tiptoe on the highest 
joint of being." 

"There breathes a living fragrance from the shore 
Of flowers yet fresh with childhood; on the ear 
Drops the light drip of the suspended oar, 

Or chirps the grasshopper one good-night carol more. 

* * * * * 

At intervals, some bird from out the brakes 
Starts into voice a moment, then is still." 

And here they wandered, Brown and the Judge, beneath the 
chestnuts, along the side of the lake, after a long table d'hote, in- 
:luding a fat bottle of Neirsteiner, and they smoked of the cigar of 
lavana and vowed that it was good to be alive; and yet despite the 
)eauty of it all, such is the perversity of the human mind — they would 
eave sublimity out in the night and betake themselves within doors 
o study integrals at the Cursaal — an occupation so absorbing that 
nidnight would almost come upon the travelers before they would 
>etake themselves off — sometimes leaving, it is said, some shekels of 
ilver with the charming French gentleman, master of the study at 
vhich our friends were only the veriest tyros, who throughout the 
light kept murmuring "maximum." 

And it is whispered by the umbrageous chestnuts that once a 
nan named Miller, having stayed overlate, absorbed in the many 
ihanges possible in a combination of twenty-five numbers, and being 
hus belated and having started in a rather perturbed state to his 
lotel, was set upon by a vandal, with a felonious intent, though his 
>stensible pursuit* was the sale of postal cards, but Miller valiantly 
■epelled his assaults, meanwhile rending the quiet air with the sharp 
English dissyllable, "Police!" 

And these same gossiping trees tell of the indignity of the arrest 
»f this same Miller and his varlet opponent and of the presence of 
rreligious and irreverant small boys in considerable numbers and of 
he mortifications and discomfort of certain principals of the painful 
iff air; but the whole story has long been doubted and many times 
lenied, and we ourselves have Miller's authority for the statement 
hat there is not a spark of truth in the narrative of the trees — at 
east not more than a spark. 

But we would speak of the days of the travelers in the Alps, 
'or now the whole party is reunited and, having at last succumbed 
o the excellence of Cook's system, have engaged a courier, one Kurt 

52 



P II ILADE L 1> III ANS ABROAD 

Grosse, and arranged for a trip over the Bernese Oberland, the St. 
Gotthard, Furka and Grimsel passes, to begin the following day. 

Meanwhile the two Millers start to climb Mt. Pilatus, leaving 
Brown and the Judge to their own devices. The ambition of these 
two worthies extended no farther than a trip on the funicular railway, 
and yet the whole day was consumed in the trip, for at the end of 
the funicular was Sonnenberg — at Sonnenberg was a golf course — 
Brown had talked gas with Scott on the Rhine boat — Scott played 
golf — the Grand Duke Michael (how well that name looks upon the 
page!) is president of the club; he plays golf, so does Brown and 
the Judge — there have been better foursomes! To this day Brown 
says he played better than the Judge, anyway, but the score card of 
the party is still extant, and then, too, young Harold Maxwell, the 
most polite little man of the whole continent, was present most of 
the time and he testifies in a slightly different key. 

On the return of the Millers to the hotel, after a day spent in an 
opaque mist on the top of Pilatus, their envy was of the burning kind 
and their displeasure was of so evident a character that Brown and 
the Judge were driven for the evening's amusement back to their 
contemplation of certain combinations of integers at the Casino, and 
as a result certain observations are still to be found written in the 
Judge's note book somewhat to the effect that "cinq" and "quatre" 
do not invariably recur either in measurable cycles nor with any 
correlation; though there are "systems" of the philosophy of those 
numbers, carefully compiled by those who have given a life study to 
peculiar little ironies noticeable sometimes in the juxtaposition of cer- 
tain small spheres and numbers theretofore of unsuspected co-ordina- 
tion, which systems claim that any such failure of recurrency is refer- 
able rather to the position of one's lucky star in the firmament than 
to any malice on the part of the integers. 

But these observations are not quite clear to us, and we hope that 
the obscurity which seems to us to exist is due to a natural saturnine 
tinge usual in all of the Judge's observations and is not the result 
of any feeling of chagrin or remorse incident to the pursuit of the 
pastime therein discussed. 

At any rate the "observations" noted the next three days are 
more readily comprehended. They deal, as we will see, with the trip 
over the passes, and although it would seem that rain fell on the first 
day, it did not fall to a degree sufficient to dampen the spirits of the 
travelers. 



53 



PHILADELPIIIANS ABROAD 



CHAPTER XVI. 

The Alps. 

At nine the whole party were in the train, leaving Luzerne with 
a schedule which called for a carriage at Goeschenen, then over the 
St. Gotthard to Andermott, and then to the top of the Furka, all to 
be done principally lolling back in the carriage, which wound its way 
steadily but slowly along the well-built military road connecting the 
Grimsel and the Bernese Oberland. The first portion of the trip, 
that part covering the St. Gotthard, and principally the "sombre 
rocky defile of the Schoellenen" was done in a light rainstorm. This 
road is one most subject to avalanches and the road is protected here 
and there by a gallery. 

The wild scenery is just the sort to be seen through the medium 
of a fine mist with its accompanying gray lights. 

Most of the party were within the covered carriage during this 
portion of the journey, but the Judge, wrapped in his London rain- 
coat, sat out on the box with the driver, who happily spoke only the 
Swiss tongue, and hence permitted a silent and complete absorption 
of the grandeur of the granite masses all about, and the boiling Reuss 
below, whose noisy progress could only be fancied, for no sound 
reached the travelers — all was solitude, intensified by the vision of 
the turbulent river, moving as in a vitoscope without the proper com- 
plement of noise. 

I'p and up we wont, the road appearing above ns in long, sinuous 
lines and nothing appearing to take away the sense of vastness and 
solitude. Sometimes a curve in the road would disclose to view a 
solitary chatelet away down below in the valley, thus bringing the 
idea of distance and remoteness more acutely to the sense; sometimes 
the raising mist would disclose a shepherd seated on a low rock in 
attendance upon an unseen herd, and sometimes we would overtake 
a lonely traveler, knapsack on back and alpine stock in hand, his 
face set for the top of the pass, and we would be past while he raised 
his head to look and shortly he would be swallowed up in the mist 
and we could doubt having seen him. 

As the morning advanced the sun dissipated the mist and a good 
breeze began to blow from the top of the snow-covered pass, clearing 

54 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

the atmosphere so that we could the more surely discern the wild 
sublimity of the scenery at the point where the Devil's Bridge crosses 
the Reuss. 

We halted a while upon the bridge, gazing at the old stone bridge 
just below us and further down at the brawling Reuss, which at this 
point drops one hundred feet in the rocks, sending its spray up over 
the bridge. It was difficult to people this solitary place with Aus- 
trians and Russians engaged in bloody conflict with the French, and 
yet here upon the narrow, rocky pathways, with the mountains rising 
like granite walls behind them and the wild Reuss boiling amid the 
rocks hundreds of feet below, on a sunshiny, peaceful day this solitude 
was alive with warring men and many a body was tumbled headlong 
on the rocks below, and some say yet ' ' 'Twas a famous victory. ' ' 

From this point on to the other side of Andermatt the most won- 
derful fortifications can be seen. Rooms, vast hall-like apartments, 
have been cut inside the mountain and a small opening in the moun- 
tainside, not much larger than to afford accommodation for the mouth 
of a cannon, may in reality be the window for a sentinel at whose back, 
hidden somewhere within the rocky walls, is a whole garrison of 
soldiers. 

We had climbed five thousand feet when we halted for lunch at 
Andermatt, and we remained but a very short time at the charming 
Bellevue before we were off again toward the steep slopes of Hospen- 
thal, passing the many mountain brooks which find their way into 
the valley from each opposite slope, and getting a fine view of the 
lofty Spitzberge, over ten thousand feet above sea level. 

By the time the Furka Blick was reached the whole party was 
glad of the opportunity for a halt and a lunch of crackers and the 
rich mountain milk which is here provided. The afternoon was far 
advanced and the height carried with it a corresponding degree of 
coldness. It was too cold to remain longer in the carriage, and from 
this point on to the Hotel Pension Furka we walked, pelting one 
another with snowballs at times and at others making slides along a 
stretch of ice by the roadside. 

It was 7 :30 when we reached the Pension Furka and sat down 
to a frugal mountain dinner; our feet were wet from the snow and 
we were tired and weary and were soon off to bed. 

The next morning was bright and clear and at eight o'clock we 
began the zigzag descent from Furka to the Rhone Glacier. All about 
us were the Bernese Alps and imposing Finsteraarhorn, and after a 

55 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

half-mile descent with this magnificent panorama about us the Matter- 
horn came into view. 

The magic name Matterhorn stirred something in the breast of 
Miller, Jr., which made for a desire to be in action, but in action 
only if danger beset him on all sides. For days he had been scoffing 
at our method of going through the Alps. He was for climbing the 
Matterhorn and wanted to wear hob-nailed shoes and carry an axe, 
in his hand. The night before he had arranged with a guide to make 
a difficult crossing of the glacier and was only prevented by the non- 
appearance of the guide, who had been secretly paid by Miller, Sr., 
not to appear. But young Miller was in despair and the sight of the 
Matterhorn was a hollow mockery to him. 

Of course a stop was made at the glacier and the party went into 
the cave cut into the solid ice of the glacier, and, of course, we delayed 
to examine the crystals and to purchase the inevitable postal cards. 

Soon we were down in the warm and beautiful valley, our road 
winding along the "infant" Rhone flowing away from the glacier, 
and as blue here, or almost as blue, as at the point where it joins 
its muddy neighbor, the Aare, below Geneva, running along without 
intermingling, the blue along one bank, the yellow along the other. 

After a stop at Gletsch we began the ascent of the Grimsel, wind- 
ing in zigzag course upward into a blinding snowstorm, which happily 
lasted only for a short time, and when we reached the Todtensee 
(Lake of the Dead), upon the top of the Grimsel, the sun shone as 
it did earlier in the morning. We were now over seven thousand feet 
high ;m<l we began a descent among the wildest, most barren portion 
of the Alps. On the other side of the pass rhododendrons and alpine 
trees had taken something away from the severity of the Alps, but 
here all was rugged and wild in stern and awful majesty. We were 
not surprised to find a hospice a little below the top of the Grimsel, 
nor to hear stories of the sufferings and death of lone travelers in 
this barren country during winter months. 

The hospice is a large, strongly-built, square building, not de- 
signed to add picturesqueness to the wild scenery, but to resist the 
surroundings when they are in a wild mood, for here avalanches are 
frequent, and just outside the building a number of trees, standing 
the spring before in the path of an avalanche, had been cut off clean a 
foot above the ground, presenting mute but strong evidence of the 
force which lay inert above us in the form of glistening snow. 

At the hospice black bread was furnished our horses, but for 
our lunch we pushed on down past the avalanche debris and the moun- 

56 



P ILILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

tain torrents to the Ilandegg Hotel, where a long stop was made for 
a trip to Handegg Fall, a cascade of the Aare, 250 feet in depth, in 
whose spray the sun fashions beautiful rainbows and helps add to 
the beauty of ''the finest cataract in Switzerland." 

The Judge did not visit the falls, but curled himself up for a 
nap in the victoria. Soon he was missing and the fearful courier 
began to alarm the others with stories of persons lost by a chance 
misstep in a ravine. Some time was spent in searching for him, and 
when he was found he was persona non grata for the rest of the after- 
noon — at Leasl until the party forgot its displeasure in the beauty 
of the gorge of the Aare. At Kichet the Aare cuts its way for 1,500 
yards through solid rock, each wall within arm's reach and over two 
hundred feet high on either side. The fifteen-hundred-yard passage 
is made by way of an iron gallery fastened to the rocky way and sus- 
the rushing Aare. Along this gallery the party passed 
and mi the other side of the gorge found the carriage in waiting 
and the remainder of the journey to Meiringen was soon completed. 

At Meiringen the two Millers again deserted the party, not to 
meet again until the night before Brown and the Judge left Paris, 
and so these latter worthies pursued the journey to Brienz, where they 
took the steamer down Lake Brienz to Inter! aken. 



57 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 



CHAPTER XVII. 

Geneva. 

Interlaken was only a stage on the journey to Bern, and only 
enough time was spent to partake of refreshments at the Hotel Jung 
Frau, to feast upon the view of the Jung Frau, with the setting sun 
reflected on its peak and then to stroll about its principal streets, 
buying a brier pipe here and a postal card or two at some other place. 

Leaving Interlaken at nine p. m., we arrived at Bern at eleven. 
The trip was a continued delight. The train ran along the shores of 
Lake Thun almost the entire way and the night was beautifully clear. 
The mountains rising from the opposite shore of the lake in the dim 
background and the tremulous surface of the lake in the foreground, 
half luminous and half dark, with suggestive depth and mystery, made 
a picture whose charm and serenity was not disturbed by any noise 
from the car, and not even by the suggestion that it was all transient 
and that we were even now on the way which led from the Alps. 

At eight o'clock the next morning we were roaming about the 
old streets of Bern. This old mediaeval city with its quaint old foun- 
tains and its old gate and clock, its old bruins appearing almost at the 
end of every street and its alpine view, deserved better of the trav- 
elers than a two-hour tramp, but Brown was bent upon reaching 
Geneva, and he was already beginning in a certain sharpness, here- 
tofore not evident in his tone, to show the wearing effect of two whole 
days spent in the company of the Judge, and so only a glimpse of 
the cathedral, with its remarkable stained windows and its great organ, 
was had and only a few moments were spent on the promenades on 
the Kleine Schanze with the superb view, and then off to the railway 
station to take the train for Geneva. 

The ride to Geneva was hot and dusty until the lake came in 
sight, and then, with window open and a breeze blowing from the 
waters lapping at the bank below, there was nothing to complain of 
in the ride except, perhaps, its length. We rode hours along the 
forty-five-mile lake with the gulls and other birds flying about, past 
the Chateau of Necker and Madame de Stael, past the Chateau Pran- 
gins, once the residence of Joseph Bonaparte, past the Castle of Chil- 
lon, past vineyards and orchards, villages and chateaux, but always 
with Mont Blanc in sight. Finally we were in Geneva lunching on 

58 



PHIL A I) E LPHIA NS A BRO A I) 

a balcony overlooking the lake and dawdling over coffee and cigars. 
The spot was one to dream in for days, but a storm was in the air 
and a queer restlessness had seized upon Brown. Action seemed its 
antidote, so we journeyed out to the meeting of the Rhone and the 
Aare and then back to town to take a carriage and drive about, visit- 
ing the Hotel de Ville (where met the ambassadors in the Alabama 
claims), the arsenal, cathedral and the Brunswick monument. 

We had just reached the Hotel Bristol when a terrific thunder- 
storm broke over the lake, and we had an opportunity of seeing it 
tempest changed, as Byron describes it, into a phosphoric sea with 
the big rain drops dancing over its surface while from the neighboring 
Alps the thunder rolled and reverberated until it seemed as if all the 
forces of nature were out intent upon a demonstration. 

The rain fell so heavily that the floor of the Bristol was almost 
inundated and Brown and the Judge were almost driven from their 
table. It had been well had this happened, for the tragedy of the 
trip was preparing to the accompaniment of the storm outside. The 
day had been very warm and Brown had been showing signs of testi- 
ness for some time. The signs of impending trouble had been many, 
and then, too, the air was overcharged with electricity. When things 
are thus in readiness it needs but a trifle to bring about the explosion. 
The solution of the continuity of good fellowship comes sometimes 
with the simple loan of a dime. When the feelings are at the boiling 
point but a trifling thing will start an ebullition. 

Now, Brown was acting as banker for the day. By virtue of 
his office it was his prerogative to order the meals, and he alone deter- 
mined the kind, quality and extent of the meals. It was a matter 
long ago agreed upon and the rule had not always strictly obtained ; 
for instance, if Brown ordered grape fruit on a day when the Judge 
was banker, and when he had decreed prunes as the breakfast fruit, 
no point was made of the rule and Brown was permitted to infringe 
upon an established right. This is as it should be and we are not 
to be supposed as raising any objection to the reasonableness of the 
arrangement. But our suggestion is that such laxity of performance 
was calculated to lure the other party to the agreement, viz., the 
Judge, into an infraction of the rule, all unprepared for any penalty 
which might ensue. We state this with hesitancy and are willing 
to recede from this position if it be shown to be untenable — but only 
on such showing. 

But to state the case : — Brown was banker, as we have said, and 
had ordered the evening meal. It was a weak, impoverished, 

59 



PH ELADELPH [ANS ABROAD 

mockery of a meal, but we let that pass. But Brown had 
not. ordered butter with the meal. Of course, it was his 
right not to do so, but our point is, Hint, having failed to do so, 
was he right in exploding into passionate objection when the Judge 
rtool< to gel ten centimes' worth of butter? Was he right, we 
repeat, in indulging in vehement, vindictive vituperation? Was he 
right to so conduct himself that the dry bread became so much dryer 
in the throat of the Judge that he was unable to swallow? And was 
he justified in going about for the balance of the evening with a sin- 
ister scowl upon his brow and with a menacing silence so deep upon 
him that no word addressed to him was hazarded by the Judge until 
ii became a question as to who will have to take the "upper" to Paris. 
We hope we will not be thought malignant when we express a modicum 
of satisfaction in the Eact that Brown, grumbling and disgruntled, lost 
! he toss of the coin ami spent the night in the stuffiest, mustiest, tiniest 

and most, appalling upper berth the horrid ingenuity of mankind has 
ever devised. 

We understand that the Judge harbors no resentment over the 
butter incident and th.it his heart is as open to Brown's friendship 
as theretofore, bu1 the memory of the miserable fracas will not vanish 
and often, oh! how often will he think unhappily of that table d'hote 
in Geneva. 



60 



I* II ILADEL1M1 I A \ s ABROAD 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

Paris. 

At 7 :30 in the morning we arrived at the Gare de Lyon and soon 
we were seated in a voiture riding through the streets of Paris. Yes, 
we were in Paris and passing along the Quai Henry IV, past the Pont 
d 'Austerlitz, along the Quai de 1 'Hotel de Ville, past Notre Dame, 
along the Rue de Rivoli, past the Louvre and turning just at the 
Jardin des Tuileries up the Rue de Castiglione, we found ourselves 
stopping a1 the Hotel Castiglione. 

Paris ! We kept repeating the word and then we rolled the names 
of the streets over on our tongue. The very names made an atmos- 
phere, as it were, through which we breathed the realization of Paris. 
This was the city about which we knew so much and yet had never 
seen. This was the city of Dumas — "that God-illumined nigger," as 
Lowrey is fond of saying; this was the city of the barricades of En- 
jolras and the bravery of little Gavroche. Here we could smoke our 
cheroots at the very table where sat Victor Hugo. 

Carlyle had peopled these streets again and again for us — had 
we not passed the immediate neighborhood of St. Antoine on our way 
from the station and did we not know it as the well-spring of that 
fearful commune. 

Along the bridges we had already noted that magic letter "N" 
wreathed, but not otherwise embellished, and speaking so eloquently 
and in such volume that our ideas crowded too thick for any con- 
secutive thought, and it was all one overwhelming sense of the thing — 
of the things, of the wonderful people — Richelieu and Voltaire, Du 
Barry and after her Mirabeau, Napoleon most of all, the one truly 
greal man since Caesar. All too overpowering, one had to calm oneself 
and assume an attitude of detachment. 

The mere sight of the name Rue Neuve des Petits Champs sets 
• me 'AX reciting Thackeray's " Boullabaisse. " The mere sound of the 
people talking sets the Judge to telling Brown : 

' ' I swear 
I have wandered about in the world everywhere; 
From many strange mouths heard many strange tongues; 
Strained with many strange idioms my lips and my lungs; 
Walk'd in many a far land, regretting my own; 
In many a language groaned many a groan; 

61 



P 11 I L A I) EL P II CANS A B EtO A I) 

But the language of languages dearest to me 

1* that in which once, ma toute cherie, 

When, together, we Lent o'er your nosegay for hours, 

You explained whal was silently said by the flowers, 

And, selecting the sweetest of all, sent a flame 

Through my heart, as, in laughing, you murmured Je t'aime." 

Tt was well we reached the hotel — a. few more familiar names of 
streets or of buildings and we would have been overcome — to have 
seen the Arc de Triomphe or the Colonne Vendome would have been 
too much. 

But we were able to postpone Paris and to subdue our excitement 
in order to take a bath -only arrived at after a struggle with a maid 
intent upon an observance of the distinction between the French 
words "bain" and "pain," for the Judge's first essay in his beloved 
tongue resulted in a loaf of bread instead of a cooling tub of water. 

After the bath came breakfast in our rooms — a breakfast of 
chocolate, rolls and marmalade. We breakfasted while we dressed, 
and while doing both, still found time to gaze out of the windows 
into the streets of the great city. 

Breakfast over, we were out in the street bound for the Church 
de la Madeline as the point from which to take an omnibus lo the Place 
de la Bastille, for this it was agreed was to be the first objective point. 

Passing into the church, through, witli the exception of St. 
Peter's, the largest bronze doors in the world, we listened to a French 
church service and looked about, mostly in search of a sign 
of wood, for we were told that no wood had been employed in 
the structure of the edifice, but we were not yet in the mood for any 
silent contemplation id' church interiors — not even beautifully sculp- 
tured .Madeline — and soon mounted upon an omnibus all plastered 
with advertisements and bearing the new words " \mer Picon," we 
began a ride along Hie boulevards t<> the Column of duly. 

Down the Boulevard des Capucines we went, along the Boulevard 
des Italiens, the Boulevard Montmarte and the Boulevard Saint Denis, 
our first ride along the most frequented boulevards of Paris, but we 
were to ride and walk these same boulevards many times again and 
we hope often yet again. 

From the Place de la Bastille we went t<> the Musee de Cluny to 
marvel much at the curiosities, some dating from the Crusades. At 
the back of the museum we wandered about the ruins of the old Ro- 
man baths and then out in the street along the Rue St. Jacques to 
the Sorbonne and the tomb of "Richelieu, from thence to the Pantheon 

62 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

to speculate, over the desecrated tombs of Rousseau and Voltaire, upon 
the mutability of the affection the French have had for their great 
men. Here, the first to be so honored, was placed the remains of 
Mirabeau, and here, too, within the space of two years was placed 
his contemporary, who fell a victim to the revolutionary fervor of 
Charlotte Corday — their sculptured figures remain, but their ashes 
were removed by solemn act of a very solemn convention of the French 
people. What a magnificent building it is, but what a travesty upon 
the stability of the French people by whom it was built and by whom 
it was inscribed "Aux grands homines la patrie reconnaissante." 
Most of its great men lie elsewhere, removed from the possibility of 
future desecration and safe from the petty motives which pursue a 
name into the grave. 

Just a little distance from this stalely home of twice departed great 
men is the temporary resting place of those unfortunates without 
homes cast up mostly by the Seine at the rate of three a day. It was 
on our way to Notre Dame, and we looked in on DuMaurier's morgue 
so that we would carry away with us an idea of the sinister side of the 
picture of pleasure-loving Paris, which we were shortly to see. 

But we had seen enough, for the morning at least, of the indi- 
vidual dead and we were glad to top it all with a general epitome, 
as it were, of all the dead past represented by the monuments and 
sculptures within the pillared aisles of Notre Dame and represented 
by the structure itself with its magnificent facade. Mrs. Elliot had 
said: "Look at the cathedrals for me," and this instruction was car- 
ried out, at. least when standing in front of the most magnificent speci- 
men of Gothic architecture. 

But it was lunch time and familiarity with the bouillons of Paris 
not yet having settled upon us, we went back along the Quai 
du Notre Dame and the arcaded Rue de Rivoli to the hotel and 
lunched magnificently, for was it not the first lunch in Paris, and 
do not all celebrations begin with or end in a feast? 



63 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 



CHAPTER XIX. 

The Boulevards. 

The feast was so thorough that the afternoon found us 
more inclined to dawdle along the streets and gaze into the 
shop windows than to make the necessary effort to visit any of the 
numerous places, and so a short stroll about found us back at the 
Place d'la Opera and bound for the hotel. 

Here began the adventure of Paris. We know no better spot 
from which to make a sortie upon Paris ; across the street is the Cafe 
de la Paix; farther down and still across is the Hotel Continental, 
from which issues all day long a stream of the most interesting looking 
travelers, going, one can imagine, to every beckoning point of the 
alluring world, one's acquaintance with which being of the geographies 
only, and hence dressed in all the charm of the imaginary country 
traveled by Sinbad. 

Yes, it is the very spot and here, just as the two travelers were 
turning toward the hotel, appeared Mrs. Erbacher. Now, Mrs. Er- 
bacher was not an old friend of either Brown's or the Judge's. In 
fact, it was only a little while at Chester that the three had had an 
opportunity to become acquainted, and so after a few casual common- 
place remarks the two would have probably carried out their inten- 
tion of returning to the hotel, had not Mrs. Erbacher happened to know 
that Charlie Wake was just across the street in a room in the Hotel 
Continental, packing his frunk preparatory to his departure from 
Paris that very afternoon. Here was an opportunity, thought Brown, 
to return the hospitality of Chester, and so Mrs. Erbacher was com- 
missioned to appear with her son within the hour at the Hotel Conti- 
nental, the presence of Wake being guaranteed by the other two. 

When they discovered Wake he was sitting in his shirt sleeves 
upon the edge of a bed, his legs sprawled on either side of an open 
trunk. In his hand was a hotel bill and upon his lips were the strang- 
est colloquial French expressions ever heard, for he was delivering 
himself of a few ideas anent the various items on the bill. 

In Chester, Wake had been but an ordinary American, conve- 
niently possessed of an automobile; but here in Paris nonchalantly 
engaged in juggling with French idioms, which clearly passed current 
with an absolutely complete French valet de chambre, he ceased to 

64 



P ILILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

be ordinary and wore the indicia and bore all the signs of that which 
he really was, one of the world's thoroughbreds. The man who the 
winter before had hunted gray wolves in Canada, the man who had 
blazed on fool a new and valuable trail in the Hudson Bay coun- 
try, the man who was at home either in the wilds of Canada or the 
jungles of the Montmarte, stood revealed in the dexterity and ease 
with which he handled the idiomatic French. 

There was no doubting the genuineness of Wake's welcome for 
Brown and there was little hesitancy over Wake's declaration that he 
would postpone his intended departure until the following day, and 
that he and Brown and the Judge and the Erbachers would all have 
one grand adventure in Paris. 

Brown and the Judge went down to the Cafe de la Paix to wait 
until the packing was finished and there along the Boulevard des 
Italiens they sat for quite an hour drinking in their first impressions 
of the boulevards and the habitues of the boulevards. 

They are not all habitues, of course, half this multitude you infer 
are but sightseers. The Oriental in turban, with swarthy skin and 
keen, roaming eye, is there to view and is not on view like the cocotte, 
who sidles by with skirt held up and eye aslant with invitation; the 
tall Englishman with flowing, broad moustache, is not to be confounded 
with the lounging boulevardier, nor with the small-sized French officer 
with his equally small-size but obviously well cared-for moustache. 

What an endless procession it is, sweeping by slowly like a broad 
river choked with logs. Every now and then someone drifts out of the 
main current and is stationary in your line of vision for a time — be- 
fore he or she is again drawn into the moving stream — a shabby vendor 
of obscene pictures or of innocuous postal cards will be cast up at 
your feet exhibiting his wares, soon to drift down through the lines 
of tables, back again into the stream and not to bob up again until 
he reaches the next cafe. Next a gamin of Paris is loosened from the 
crowd with a bundle of papers under his arm. ' ' La Gil Bias, " "La 
Patrie. " Thrusting a journal under your eye, he will cry out the need 
of learning about Dreyfus, who was reinstated that afternoon, or of 
knowing all about the "Revolution in Russia," for that day the 
Douma has been prorogued, and Paris, or the Parisian press, has 
Russia in a revolution. 

Beyond the pavement you have a glimpse now and then of the 
street, crowded like the pavement with its traffic, carriage after car- 

65 



IMIILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

riage rolls along on its way, you conclude, to the Champs Elysee, 
and out of the main stream, stranded for a while you will see a eocher 
and his voiture, with the now indispensible taximeter attachment, wait- 
ing for a fare. At tho corner omnibus succeeds omnibus and each 
in its turn trundles off crowded with people, seemingly intent upon 
emptying the boulevard, but the stream of people never lessens. 



66 



1* II I LA 1) KLPHIANS ABROAD 



CHAPTER XX. 

Amer Picon. 

Brown and the Judge were almost hypnotized by the never-ending 
and continuous throng and had almost been content to sit on watch 
tin- ever-changing crowd indefinitely, but Wake came up full of plans 
for an evening's entertainment and soon they were in a discussion as to 
whether the whole party should go to the theater or whether they 
should spend the evening on the Montmarte among the cabarets. The 
latter plan was adopted and imbued with the energy born of decision, 
Wake clapped his hands for a waiter and ordered Amer Picon : ' ' Gar- 
con, donnez-moi un Amer Picon, Citron ! ' ' 

A consideration of the Event will demonstrate that the important 
one comes unheralded. It may have been a long time in the chry- 
salis; it may have been preparing in a set of small circumstances for 
a considerable period, and out of little happenings there may have 
been fashioning a sizable occurrence; but nothing of consequence 
develops to prepare the mind for the Event, so that it comes suddenly, 
as it were, and with full force upon the consciousness — making its 
impression, good or bad, and leaving its imprint beneficial or delete- 
rious, but always coming with a force to be reckoned with and with 
a certainty not permitting doubt as to its presence or future specu- 
lation of its having been. 

Sitting there over a three-legged marble top table on the Boule- 
vard des Italiens, idly gazing at the passing throng, what was there 
to herald the approach of so momentous a discovery as Amer Picon? 

No prescient breeze, borne upon the Parisian air, stirred the 
thoughts of the travelers: not a sound, strange and unfamiliar as the 
sounds all were, spoke with a note of discovery to our receptive friends, 
and even the words Amer Picon themselves only awakened a polite 
curiosity as to Wake's strange proclivity for mild drinks — a polite 
curiosity of sufficient strength to induce the ready acquiescence of the 
two to Wake's mild suggestion that they try an "Amer Picon" them- 
selves. 

Meanwhile he explained to them that "Amer" was French for 
bitter and that Picon was the name of the Frenchman who made the 
bitters, and that citron with which the Amer was mixed was a syrup 

67 



1MI IL A DELPHIAN S ABROAD 

made o\' citrons and was mixed with the bitters out of a certain per- 
versity characteristic of the French to mix the bitter and sweet. 

And now the garcon comes forward with a bottle labeled "Amer 
Picon" and bearing a statement to the effect that the bitters were 
made of an Algerian root and were very efficacious in eases of fever, 
agile and nervous depression. After pouring the "bitters" in a iilass 
of tumbler size and mixing with it about one-fourth the quantity of 
citron, the waiter proceeded to fill the idass with water and after 
stirring well sat the decoction before the travelers. 

It was a solemn moment. Outside the line of tables. Paris passed 
in procession as before. The newsboys kept proclaiming the fall o( the 
Douma and the imminence o\' a revolution in Russia, all unconscious 
o\' the revolution in making about the table bearing the bottle " Amer 
Picon." 

The weary cochers waved their inviting whips with the same dull 
air. wearied with their knowledge of the eternal monotony of it all, 
little thinking that the germ o\' a greal discovery was silently working 
in evolutionary throes upon the very boulevard whose sameness they 
had come to regard as established. 

Yes. it was a solemn moment and one treated with due solemnity 
by our friends, and to this day if a stranger on being introduced to 
"Amer Picon" does not subside into appreciative silence, if he does 
not at once sink into a contemplation of the eternal principle of good 
in the universe, but on the contrary engages in ordinary table chatter 
or continues a useless discharge o\' dull ideas, he is silently and com- 
passionately but none the less sternly dropped from consideration 
for membership in that heaven-blessed body, The Amer Picon Club. 

After tasting slowly and appreciatively of the beverage after 
quietly noting its name in their note-books, and after painfully prac- 
ticing the way o[' saying "Garcon, donnez-moi un Amer Picon." our 
friends settled back quietly in their eliairs to a realization of the 
great fact. 

It was a lonp: time before the Judge emitted the thought that one 
Amer Picon would turn an Anchorite into a howling Dervish. He 
Lighted a new cigar and had almost consumed it before he broke out 
into an ecstatic enumeration of the virtues hidden in "Amer" and its 
great possibilities. 

"Why," said he. "one Amer would make a jack rabbit 
sit up and slap a bulldog in tin- face." Would that we could indulge 
in the verbal pyrotechnics set off by the Judge on this occasion. He prat- 
tled in hexameters. TTe was a fountain of words. They flowed from 

68 



P II I L A I) E L P II I A NS A B ROAD 

him with the same pleasing gurgle that the Amer flowed from its 
bottle. And having started, there was Dot an end to his discourse as 
there was to the amer. Ead it not been accessary to go off up to 

the Etue de Clichy to ;i restaurant said by Wake to be renowned for 

its tripe a la mode, he would have made ;i peroration fit for his subject, 
but the best remarks about amer were stifled in the Judge's bosom, 
and now the reader will have to learn of the virtues of the beverage 
in the sacred precincts of the Amer Picon Club if he be so fortunate 
as to gain admittance, as we earnestly trust he will. 



69 



PTI1L A DKL V II IANS ABROAD 



CHAPTER XXI. 
Paris at Night. 

Into the Rue de Clichy, just above the Rue St. Lazare, went the 
party and upstairs on the second floor of a small restaurant to be 
attended by a solicitous and attentive waiter. Brown and Wake pro- 
claimed the tripe a chef d'oeuvre, but the Judge pined for other 
things and would have none of it, though the place pleased him, for 
it was French every inch, from the carte du jour to the old roue sev- 
eral tables removed, engaged in the pastime of pinching the cheeks 
of a charming but hardly innocent looking French damsel of 
possibly eighteen summers, who was almost openly engaged in carry- 
ing on a flirtation with an equally old and ugly-looking Philistine at 
an adjoining table. 

Then out into the street again to take coffee and cognac at a 
table along the boulevard and smoke their cigars and afterwards off 
to the Moulin Rouge, for it was still early and too soon to attempt 
the real sights of pleasure-loving Paris. 

They stood about in the Moulin Rouge in the space back of the 
seats. A vaudeville performance in front of them on the stage and 
behind them in the "promenoir," dancing couples and prowling 
cocottes. It was all sordid and almost flagrantly vicious and did not 
detain the party long. 

The cabarets were the real attractions. If they were vulgar it 
was only at times, and then with an honest, open, hearty vulgarity, 
which was only of good fellowship and was lost to sight in the spon- 
taneity of the clever vulgarian and wholly swallowed up in the general 
healthy tone of the place, a tone in such direct contrast to the Moulin 
Rouge. 

The Cabaret du Conservatorie du Montmarte, its walls decorated 
by sketches made by its habitues, with here and there a cartoon, was 
the first introduction of the party to the regular cabaret of the Mont- 
marte. 

During the evening they visited the Cabaret de Bruant, the 
C^uat-Z'Arts, where sing the best of the chansonniers, and the Boite a 
Fursy, half cabaret and half theater, where all of clever Paris attends 
to hear the latest satires of Henri Fursy. 

These cabarets are unique and have no parallel in this country. 

70 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

They ar>- small, uncomfortable places, with hard, wooden benches run- 
ning about the walls and long, rough tables set before the benches. 
At one side of the room there is always a piano and beside it a raised 
platform, where the chansonnier takes his stand to sing the song he 
has written and which is now being heard on every phonograph in 
Paris. 

As one enters the proprietor shouts a noisy welcome from 
some part of the room, or else makes a jest of the newcomer and joins 
in the general laugh which follows. After this regular greeting one 
is permitted to find an obscure corner and listen to the political or 
satirical songs, mostly written by the chansonniers themselves, and 
the quality of these songs is of the best, for here is the cradle of much 
of French art. In these cradles of art first appeared sketches 
and poems of authors like Armand, Masson and Rollinat, with illus- 
trations by such celebrated artists as Caran d'Ache and Willette. 

A certain boisterous humor prevails in all the cabarets, and partic- 
ularly is this true of Aristide Bruant's. Here the party almost fell 
afoul of French humor. The Judge had invested ten centimes in 
a copy of one of the songs, and as the party was about to leave the 
cabaret the price of the song was demanded again, and on meeting 
with a refusal to pay a second time one of the habitues snatched the 
Judge's hat and locked it in a small cabinet on the wall. "Donnez 
moi ma chapeau, ' ' demanded the Judge, and his demand was taken up 
and made into a sort of nasal chant in which everyone joined : 
' ' Donnez moi ma chapeau ! " " Donnez-moi, Donnez-moi. ' ' The effect 
was indescribably funny and soon everyone was laughing heartily with 
everyone else. The hat was produced and the Judge essayed a speech 
in French, each word being punctuated by vociferous applause. Final- 
ly he presented a cigar with much ceremony to Aristide, and what 
might have terminated unpleasantly was ended in the most gratifying 
way, and the party went out on the boulevard full of praises for that 
great French institution, the cabaret. 

From the cabarets to the Victor Masse was but a step or two 
and soon the whole scene had changed and a new aspect of la Vie 
Parisien was on view within the walls of the Bal Tabarin. Here was 
a large ball room, ablaze with lights and crowded to the doors. Even 
the galleries, which ran all around the walls of the room, were full 
of men and women seated at tables or lounging about and gazing at 
the dancers below. The dance was "La Likette," so named in some 
sardonic and shameless vein of French humor. The dance itself was 
more sensuous and abandoned than one could well indicate. The 

71 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

flushed and emotion-surged faces of the women, the sinuous movements 
of their bodies, the villainously suggestive notes of the music and the 
horrid leer of the eyes of some devotee of the dance not yet immersed 
in its sensuous results, all made for a scene flagrantly vile and disgust- 
ingly vicious. 

Here was a view of the real side of French life, the side the 
French seem to live for, and this open, shameless view of it confirmed 
one in the belief that Filson Young is right in saying : ' ' Paris thinks 
of only one thing, exists for only one thing. All day it toils and 
earns money, and builds houses, and prepares food, in order that at 
night it may devote itself to its one interest." 

After the Bal Tabarin the party went to the Cabarets du Ciel 
and L'Enfer to inspect what proved to be but very sordid illusions 
with the inevitable sexual note being constantly sounded. The waiters 
dressed as apostles and chanting some unattractive jargon, sacrilegious 
and without even the merit of cheap wit, the tableaux by unattractive 
women of the boulevards, all served to make for vulgarity and the 
commonplaee. This aspect was a little relieved when young Erbacher 
was persuaded to go through the ghastly ceremony of being tied to a 
stake and burned alive. He was induced to go on the stage and suffer 
himself to be bound to a stake. Presently his body was seemingly 
enveloped in flames and when these died down nothing was left but 
a shocking, charred corpse; but even this only raised the tedium for a 
moment, and it was good to get away from this tawdry and trite enter- 
tainment in the company of the rustling chestnut trees out on the 
moon-lit boulevard. 

It was two o'clock in the morning and the party was beginning 
to be hungry, and Wake's suggestion of a little supper at the Cafe du 
Rat Mort was well received. Soon they were all up on the second 
floor of this well-known place, seated with their backs to the wall and 
gazing at the fevered fun of the "elegant cocotte." They had arrived 
in the midst of the fun, a red-coated first-violin had stepped forth 
from the band and was playing a cakewalk, while a handsome, over- 
dressed woman, cigargette in hand and face flushed with wine, went 
up and down the long side of the L-shaped room between the tables, 
gracefully dancing the graceless and awkward dance. 

While the waiter brought delicious soupe a l'oignon and the 
omelet au rum, a second Carmen came forth and danced to the music 
of her country. She danced down to the Wakes' table, and made some 
jest upon the youth of Erbacher, and then she was off to another to 
sit upon someone's knee. 

72 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

When the party issued from the cafe to the Rue Pigalle it was 
daylight, the morning air had a cooling effect upon the jaded and 
fevered sense, and as Brown and the Judge rode through the Pari- 
sian streets, now being cleaned and watered, it was with a general 
feeling of having seen enough of that side of Paris — that side which is 
of the boulevards and the shaded lamps, of the gorgeous gowns and the 
flashing jewels. 



73 



P H I L A D E L P H I A N S ABROAD 



CHAPTER XXII. 
The Louvre. 

The next morning at eleven o'clock found them at the entrance 
to the Louvre deep in the business of arranging for the guardianship 
of that inimitable "guide and interpreter," "Colonel" J. D. Stickney, 
with his creased and edge-worn "permanent authorization from the 
custodian of the national palaces," with his certificates and testimo- 
nials innumerable, with his list of patrons, from General Grant down 
through the Vanderbilts and Morgans to the Carnegies, all speaking 
highly of his qualities, but not more eloquently than he himself spoke, 
nor more clearly than his general air and appearance proclaimed the 
broken character long since surrendered to absinthe and Le Vie Pa- 
risien. 

Long live Stickney and when he dies may he ascend to some 
absinthian paradise of his dreams ! 

Be look llic two voyageurs through a portion of the Louvre and 
gave them memories never to be forgotten. He insisted upon Brown 
and the Judge using the whispering vases — he disclosed to their 
view the Venus di Milo and the Nike of Samothrace, and he showed 
the Michel Angelos, the Raphaels, the Titians, the Leonardo da Vincis, 
the Correggios, and especially Murillo's "Conception," and more 
especially Ingre's "La Source" and Greuze's "Spring" and a number 
of Corots. 

And afterwards a cigarette and an Amer Picon at a cafe opposite 
the Porte Marengo and for the further enjoyment of a modest lunch 
at the Bouillon Aristide on the Rue St. llonore. 

Ah ! it was a day to be marked with a white stone. The afternoon 
was spent on the Seine. Stickney and his charges took the Bateau 
Hirondelles for St. Cloud and Sursenes. There the now inevitable 
Amer Picon was had in the beautiful gardens of the Ermitage de 
Longchamp. Then back by tram car to the Place de la Concord, skirt- 
ing the Bois du Bologne almost the entire trip. Then the under- 
ground railway to the Arc de Triomphe and back by way of the Pont 
Neuf to the Cafe Modern, where Stickney initiated his charge in the 
mysteries of mixing absinthe. "Mix slowly and let it stand for half 
an hour — and then throw the mixture into the street, ' ' said Stickney. 
Alas! he never did so. 

74 



PHILADELPHIANS ABROAD 

When dinner time came Brown proposed a dinner in keeping with 
the day and a special carriage was ordered, and Antoine, on the box, 
wore a brilliant cockade and, attired in evening clothes, the two 
worthies rolled out through the Bois, through the multitude of car- 
riages, with their brilliant-looking occupants, to the Cafe Catelan, 
where they dined in state on fifty francs, with Neirsteiner and Filets 
sole and Angeau and afterwards drank their black coffee and smoked 
long cigars and swore there were never two such men and that the 
world was not such a dull old place after all. 

And then, when they came back, they met Duncan Anderson, 
another guide and friend of Stickney, and they went out along the 
boulevards and sat at the little three-legged tables and drank their 
bock, while Marius Wirtz sat opposite and made their silhouettes and 
told them of his struggles and was very grateful for their cigarettes 
and bock. 

Pooi' Marius Wirtz, who lived at 4 Passage Piemantsi, Montmarte, 
and who had such great dreams of being a sculptor of renown ! We 
hope he is making great progress in the world, and it is not so "tres 
difficle ' ' for him to eke out his existence in that cold, careless, pleasure- 
loving Paris of his. 



75 



P H I L A 1) E L P H I A N S ABROAD 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

Versailles. 

Promptly at nine the next morning Stiekney was off with his 
patrons to the Gare St. La /.are, where "trois premier classe billets" 
were purchased for Versailles, and the party was oft' on the Chemiu 
de Fer. 

The Grand Trianon was firsl visited. The day was clear and the 
air balmy and wandering about the gardens of the Grand and the Petit 
Trianon, listening to Stiekney's stories of Madame de Maintenon and 
Marie Antoinette, or to his tales o\' Du Barry, called up by a sight 
of her quaint sleigh, gave the righl tone to such a setting. 

What visions of the past one could conjure up at sight of the 
Swiss Hermitage, built by a foolish king for the object of his affec- 
tions at sight of the Temple of Love, or within Du Barry's own room, 
with its secret stairway, to that other room where dwelt the supplanter 
of Cosse de Brassac. 

What memories of the time when the sick king was carried from 
his room in La Petit Trianon to that room in the Chateau of Versailles 
next to the Oeil-de-Boeuf, and with him Du Barry — "the corpus 
delicti still under his nose" — poor Du Barry soon to be packed off 
with the rest of the shams of her time, and leaving these memento moti 
behind her — the costly symbols of the costliest reign of the most 
extravagant Louis. 

It was time to go over to the chateau and see the very rooms, 
and thither the party went, driving through the park and stopping 
on the way for Lunch at the Hotel Des Reservoirs and then going 
around to the entrance of the chateau from the gardens, where the 
long facade can best be seen and where from the terrace may be had 
the best view of the famous gardens laid out so long ago. 

With Stiekney preceding and pointing with his cane at the differ- 
ent noteworthy pictures, room after room was visited. The chambers 
of the queen, with its ceiling paintings by Boucher, and the chamber 
of the queen's guards, so well defended once by Miomandre, while the 
queen, fleeing for her life across the Oeil-de-Boeuf, found safety in 
the chambers of the king. 

And now across this Oeil-de-Boeuf with its memories of 
those dark days preceding the revolution, when Sanseulottism shook 

76 



PHILA DKLI'II I ANS ABROAD 

the gates outside and cried for "bread and the end of these brabbles," 
and, not getting assurances of bread, broke through the gates and, 
storming up the marble court, killed the body guard of the king in 
this very chamber. 

What whispering and plotting has been done here — what intrigues 
and plans have not been formed in this room. There is about it much 
of the history of the early revolution, and surely from it issued much 
of the cause of that fearful revolt. 

The pictures of the Knights Templar in the room below made 
Brown linger, and he and Stickney discoursed on the mystery of the 
hidden shrine. 

There was the Seige of Constantine by Vernet and the Storming 
of the Trocadero by Paul Delaroche, and many pictures of Napo- 
leon, but it had become impossible to individualize the pictures, so 
many had been seen, and from this collection we went forth 
to wander around the gardens before taking the train to the Hotel 
Invalides, there to view the tomb of Napoleon and carry away with 
us an ineradicable impression of that great man of destiny. 

And now, being wearied of sights, we adjourned to the 
Cafe La Mere Moreaux, where Victor Hugo was wont to smoke his 
cigarette and refresh himself. Here some of the celebrated fruit pre- 
served in alcohol was eaten and a cigarette smoked to the memory of 
that great one who knew the people of Paris so well, and afterwards 
off to dine at the Cafe de la Paix and to spend the evening in and 
about the boulevards and to revel in their broad spaciousness and in 
the many types passing to and fro. It was the last night on the boule- 
vards, for the next day was to be spent in shopping and the next even- 
ing with Miller and his son, who had arrived from Switerland. 

It was good-by to the boulevards, and hence good-by to Paris, to 
beautiful, gay Paree, "disgusting, delightful Paree. " 

On Saturday morning the party separated once again, Miller and 
his son staying over for the Kaiserin Victoria and Brown and the 
Judge taking the train for Cherbourg to board the S. S. Philadel- 
phia and return to their homes. 

Of the homeward voyage there is little to record. The log of 
that voyage tells of high winds and big seas, of wild storms and dense 
fogs. Many trips to the lee scuppers are remembered with but few of 
the passenger list appearing on deck during the entire trip. 

Here and there is a glimmer of light as when the memory of 
Merry Sunshine comes athwart the memory of leaden skies and trou- 

77 



P II IP A D E L P II 1 A N S A B R A 1> 

bled stomach, and always is the thoughl of the solicitous Githens ad- 
justing a steamer rug about limbs too cold and unsteady to care for 
themselves. 

But for tlic whole trip there is a series of memories of the most 
varied and most entrancing kind memories of moments it has been 
impossible to record because their charm was of thai intangible charac- 
ter which defies analysis and detail. 

It was all iu the impression, and one got only as one gave. To 
each happening there had to be brought a lively interest ami sympa- 
thy, and indelible impressions only came from tolerant receptivity. 

Wbat is there in pigeon pie if it be not its English nativity? And 
sometimes ••> cynical, analytical attitude of mind asks the question: 

"What is there to Amer Picon except that you drank it tirst on a 
Parisian Boulevard?" Put to this latter question we raise a depreca- 
tory hand of protest. The spirit of tolerance must stop somewhere 
lest we lose every rallying point of opinion. 
And so. adieu. 

"Foi 'in-, my skill's but very sm;i', 
An' skill in prose I've nunc :i v:i ' ; 
lint quiet lonwiso, between us Uva, 

WVi'l may yen speed! 



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